We woke to another pea souper. So happy that didn’t happen earlier. We could see Craig and Ev beside us, but no further. It slowly lifted as we ate our breakfast and packed up.
We headed out towards Port Hedland, leaving our rubbish and recycling and using the other handy nearby facilities.
We had time for a bit of sightseeing in Port Hedland, and watched a big boat come in, noting the difference in height between the loaded and unloaded boats. The tugs were very busy as we enjoyed our cuppa.
We filled up at the prepay puma fuel in the industrial area as it was about 8c per litre cheaper than the others around town.
Trucks with 3 and 4 trailers (60m long) are all over the place. 2 out of 3 vehicles have Fluoro signage on the side (mine vehicles). We had to follow a wide load vehicle with huge metal structure and 3 others as we headed out of town.
Luckily they pulled over for a load check, allowing us an opportunity to get ahead of them. Karijini here we come.
We were reluctant to stop for lunch and have to overtake all those 60m long trucks again, but at about 1:30 we decided to pull over into the “two camels creek rest area” and were lucky enough to jag a table under shade. We boiled the jetboil and had a hot cuppa and wraps for our lunch with some of that delicious prized salad in them.
We started counting road trains that we passed and had 18 within the first 20 km of counting. It is just crazy! We are feeling for our fellow travellers who are towing. Those rigs sure blow you around on the road.
We dropped in at the visitors centre briefly (finding that a number of locations are currently closed) and then to the camp host to verify the number of campsite for the 3 of us. A lot of the sites are directly off of the road through the campground but we have a little road in that feeds into our 3 campsites (and we could have all squeezed onto one site) so we have heaps of space, even if there are not a lot of large trees.
On days like this long one (the second of two of over 500km) we are happy to have a set-up that is quick to pack up and not blown around too much.
The other two arrived just before sunset (hooray) and pulled in to their spacious parks. It has been a long drive for all of us. 545 km today. We have covered just over 1000km in two days that we were planning to do in five. We have missed out on visiting Millstream and still need to figure out whether we back track to there and add km to the next leg or settle with missing it.
Luvapuzzle 