Road Accidents, among other things

The sky was bright at 7am, but the sun still wasn’t up.  I watched the red glow on the horizon become a molten red ball. It was so still and quiet.  Obviously no kids were up yet!

Last night, after we’d stopped, Grant and a few children went off and chatted to Bob from Geraldton, camped across the dirt, and he told them all sorts of interesting things about the grass people of Camooweal and peacocks outside of Broome, and other places he had been to.  Later he told me all about the sandflies I could expect further north!  He is travelling in an old ute, catching fish and taking his time.  He is off to Camooweal next.  I didn’t see any water much in Camooweal when we went past.  Not sure how good the fishing will be.

Anyway, he was up and away this morning, with only one to feed and tidy up after.  Us, on the other hand, took a while to get going, not leaving our campsite, 71km east of the Stuart Highway, until a quarter to nine!  Oh well, it was our first bush camp, and maybe we need a bit of practice.

While we were packing up, I sent Joseph off to the bin, and Dominic and Oskar went along to explore.  Joseph came back, but the other boys went off tracking Bob’s tyre marks!  Dom’s getting right into this bush living!

We were all very excited reaching “Three Ways” (the intersection between the Barkly Highway and the Stuart Highway) and discovering we had internet and phone access. Lots of emails and phone calls were made, in the process of which I discovered my phone (thanks Dan) had lost half an hour……oh, that explained the lateness of the sun.  We are in another time zone and everything is now half an hour later.  So really we left at 8.15am this morning! J

The landscape we are driving through is very green with small scrubby bushes everywhere.

Pulled up beside the road for lunch just north of Renner Springs.  Dominic and Oskar headed off into the scrub, no doubt on the hunt for bones of some kind!  Nadine went bush for other reasons – came back to say she’d accidentally pee’d on her foot – seemed to find that inordinately funny.  Cooper went and found a tree.

We stopped in Elliott for fuel – more LPG much to Grant’s joy .  $1.27/L.  An all-time record so far.  I thought I’d check out what they had for sale in the metal-caged general store so I headed inside, under the watchful eyes of the various indigenous groups sitting around.  They had some basic groceries ($6.50 for one green capsicum) however I thought the bread looked a bit old.  On the bottom shelf were some withered crumpets – packed on 4 February 2010!  I wasn’t really interested in the food after that.

Just outside of Elliott we were stopped by a road accident.  It had just happened 3 or 4 minutes ago.  A man in his fifties had fallen asleep behind the wheel of his little red Toyota Yaris and had swerved into the path of a large road train towing 4 trailers.  The car seemed to have rolled over and was sitting in the ditch beside the road with all the glass in the car broken.  Fortunately, the man and his son were walking around, although the man had a cut on his head and some blood on his shirt.  Their bags were thrown out around them on the ground, and parts of the car were spread out about 10 metres up the road, right up to the road train.  It must have swerved and was right across the road.  Upright, thankfully.

One man called an ambulance because he was sure the people in the car were injured or dead.  Praise the Lord they looked perfectly fine.

Grant got to try the off-road capabilities of the van as we drove around the road train and continued on our way.

North of the Sir Charles Todd Monument (some fellow who organized the final link in the Overland Telegraph line which linked Australia to Britain) the little shrubs grew into tall trees, however the road still pointed straight north.

We had big hopes for the town of Larrimah – one of the LPG stops on Grant’s internet list, however, like so many of the towns out here, it turned out to be a dust bowl with one or two run down buildings.  The petrol station was a collapsed corrugated iron shed that probably hasn’t been operating for several years.  The hotel was pink, though, and they had a large pink panther and stubby bottle outside.  Just past Larrimah we passed a sign saying no alcohol or pornography allowed past this point.

We have stopped for the night at the Warloch rest area, down wind of the toilet block (better planning next time!).  We had yummy pumpkin soup with lentils for tea, followed by buckwheat pancakes (only a little bit of buckwheat) and maple syrup.  The trucks coming up the road sound like aeroplanes, but they are not very frequent, and the people across the way have turned off their generator, so should be a good night!