Yeah!!! Five months on the
road.....but only two months to go....and tomorrow will be ONE month and 29
days.....noooooo!
This is weird as I am writing
about today....today. Since we have reached Broome small flying things have
invaded out van every night. We have got better at minimising them by leaving
the lights off as much as possible, but regularly there are enough in the van
by the time we go to bed that you can’t use the computer (to write the blog) or
phone as they flock to it, well...like moths to a light. But tonight we didn’t
make it to camp until after dark and there isn’t a flying bug inside the
van....so i have taken the opportunity to go hard and catch up on the last 10
days!
We didn’t really have a plan other
than to get away reasonably early so we packed up and messed around a bit
before saying goodbye to out BFF and heading off. I had some work that I needed
to get done on the internet and the Imintji store is the only place on the
whole 660km Gibb River Road where you can get WIFI. There is NO phone reception
the whole way so paying $8/100Mb seemed pretty reasonable. We fuelled up and I
parked the rig while De and the boys went to pay and check out the store
(that’s pretty exciting stuff around here). I then came up with an idea. Avid
readers will have heard me blog (do you hear a blog??) about the boys Co-op,
where they sell a few things to get some pocket money. Well their enthusiasm
has diminished significantly and I want to lighten the van as much as possible,
so I thought this might be a good opportunity to do a sales call....yeah we
cleared out all of the remaining torches and a box of crocheads to boot!!
We set ourselves up in the grassy
garden beside the store and while I emailed my work of, painfully slowly, De
checked he facebook and the boys played some games. Pretty soon the BFF rolled
in and we spent the next two hours there chatting. While we were there a lovely
middle aged lady, Susan, who lives in Theda (??) which is up near the Mitchell
Plateau also stopped for morning tea. She told us all about the road and how
wonderful it was up there.....so now we are not only doing the Gibb River Road,
we are also going up to Mitchell Falls...bloody awesome!
We rolled down the road a bit
further and took a side road into Adcock Gorge. It was reasonably rough on the
way it but we had to stop at the river crossing and walk the rest of the way as
the trees were getting to close to Gator. I walked ahead and found a
magnificent little gorge. As we were walking in another couple were leaving and
we had the whole place to ourself. Bell Gorge was amazing but not having to share
it with 50 other people made this just as awesome!
We trundled back up the road and
De reminded me that I was supposed to send emails to the boys teachers at
Imintji....oppps....hmmmm.....so we pulled into the Mt Barnett Road house, the
only other establishment for 360km and I managed to talk them into letting me
into their office and sending it via the satellite connection...for a couple of
bucks! Nice! It did however take about 1 hr to send the two 4 meg emails which
put us behind schedule.
We reached the turn off to Barnett
River camp just as dusk was approaching. It was only 5kms in so that shouldn’t
be a problem. Ahhh...the road was really rough so we slowed to a crawl but we
could see a camper set up not too far away. As we got closer we realised it was
in the middle of the road. We drove around it and could see why it was sitting
there, its chassis had cracked in half!
I was in 4WD high but seeing that
reminded me these things are breakable so I switched down to low and crawled
the next very bumpy 3kms into camp. We set up in 2 minutes flat, had a quick dinner
and just as we were about to throw the boys into bed we realised that Jack’s
window, at the back of the van, wasn’t air tight.....leaving a lovely fine film
of red dust across everything, especially his bed
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