Leaving Port Hedland

From now on the blogs will be more like diary entries, maybe then I can stay on of them and not forget things we have done!!

Tuesday 15th Of Feb:

Left Port Hedland about midday, rained all night up to the point of us leaving and kept raining all throughout our drive. Very strange weather for a town that 'never gets any rain' even the locals were stunned. We really didn't want to stay any longer though so once we checked if the roads were open we were off!

We went down the inland hwy and arrived at the Auski road house at about 4pm, the weather was still horrible so we decided to stay a night and see if it would be better tomorrow for Karajini National Park

We paid $1.72 for diesel, so expensive! Even the 'budget caravan park' was $35 a night for a powered site, and it's nothing special very old green toilets. even though there has been a heap of rain it is still shorts and t-shirt weather, the breeze is nice for a change though.

Wednesday 16th Feb:

Woke up about 6:30am and was still overcast, went to plug in my laptop and noticed we had lost power, we had a look around and found our caravan had been leaking water from the inside near the light switch, we were lucky it didn't catch fire! The rain held off a little while we packed up in the morning but as soon as we drove off it started pouring again!! We heard there was also a cyclone building off the coast, we may have to stop somewhere for a few days and wait it out.

We were meant to be stopping at Karajini National Park but the rain was full on, plus if we got stuck somewhere because of road closures we wanted it to be somewhere with power!

We stopped in and had some lunch at Tom Price, another big mining town.

This truck weighs 98,000kgs when empty!

We kept driving and ended up at a roadhouse called Nanutarra, we decided to stay here a night and see if the weather improves and at this point in time it was the only place in the west coast that was not raining!

We paid $25 for a powered site on the dirt and shouted ourselves some dinner at the roadhouse, for 3 drinks and 2 hamburgers with chips it cost us $51!!! I know we are in the middle of nowhere but that is still a joke.

The rain held off long enough for us to seal the holes and put a tarp up.

There are thousands of flies here so head nets were worn for the first time!

Thursday 17th Of Feb:

Woke up and went straight to the roadhouse to catch some news, turns out there is a blue alert for coral bay and exmouth and that's where we are heading!! We are going to be stuck here at least another day and there is NOTHING to do here. We are lucky though as it still has not rained much, a few light showers.

The roadhouse was starting to get busy as all the roads around us were closed due to flooding, we are lucky we took the inland road this far because apparently the road to Karratha was closed the morning we left, we are also lucky we left Auski when we did as they were literately closing the roads the behind us!

We passed the time by reading, watching a few movies and we also went for a walk to have a look around....

The ashburton river.

We cooked our own tea tonight, bangers & mash, very cheap compared to last night.

Friday the 18th Of Feb:

We got up and saw images of the cyclone and it looks like its heading out to sea so we are getting out of Nanutarra and heading to Exmouth, which is about 280 kms away from here.

We just drove past a pretty horrific crash about 50kms from the roadhouse, a car was upside down and there were ambulance, police and a fire truck, trying to get someone out, a reminder of how careful we have to be.