November 8

Now what I did not tell you yesterday as I did not want to ruin the setting of our illegal campsite was that a large truck decided this was also a good spot to sleep over.  Well, more truthfully, his time limit on driving was up and he had to pull over.  While we enjoyed the quietness of night setting in we heard his engine coming to a halt, not a bother to us as we were well hidden, but this truck was a refrigeration one and it was not long before he started up the auxiliary refrigeration unit, loud and just like a generator in our back garden.  What to do?  The only answer was to let our imaginations run riot and pretend we were in a luxury eco type camp with hot water, showers, electric lights etc and the noise of the generator was powering it all.  This guy left at 4:30 a.m., yes we were awake that early.

With another long drive ahead of us we were packed up and on the road by 7:00 a.m. heading for Meekatharra, more tarmac, more road trains and a flat shapeless landscape to keep us entertained.

 Following a map, I saw there was a track off to the right and located on this track was a hotel, now a ruin.  Sound like the sort of entertainment we need to go hunt for a ruined hotel and have a cup of tea.  We must have traveled more than 15km along this track with no sign of the hotel, only a couple of eagles eating road kill so time to turn around and head back to the grey hard highway.

My map also mentioned that Meekatharra had Internet access so about 50km away I fired up the laptop, stuck in the modem and waited patiently for a blue light.  Hurray, 20km out of Meekatharra the modem sprung to life and I was connected to the information highway instead of the Great Northern Highway.  Alan seeing my excitement pulled over so I could upload another blog post (November 4) and he too got our his laptop to see what was happening in the world.  15 minutes later we were on our way again, Alan driving and me still uploading the post to Blogspot.

A quick replenishment of supplies, water etc and we left Mekatharra (there was nothing much there to entertain us for long) and we took a left turn onto a gravel unsealed road heading for a legal campsite with no facilities called North Pool.  Some of these places we head to are hard to find without an outback sat-nav which we are also using to navigate our way around parts of this wonderful continent.  The highway was called the Goldfields Highway and headed to Wiluna where it then changes to a tarmac highway with the same name.  At least 184km of no tarmac is far more interesting than a dark, scaring, traffic ridden ride.

20km west of Wiluna is one of the tracks to North Pool so we attempted this one first.  There had been a fair bit of rain in this area and the road was mega muddy so we opted for the easier option, reversed out of the mud and continued through Wiluna (a very small town), finding the correct road to the other entrance to North Pool camping ground.

This was all oh so worth the effort.  We had the place to ourselves and ended up resting Winston's weary tyres under a tree about 10 feet from the pools edge.  In your minds I imagine you see a pool with crystal clear waters, alas no, due to the rain this pool is a beautifully watery version of the red land, so picturesque to look at but not very inviting for a swim.  Surrounded by bird and parrots the cameras were out again to capture the moment.

Kitchen duty tonight was gourmet based, I had both burners on the go, one for the kettle to make a cup of tea the other to cook a packet of rice dinner we purchased somewhere on our journey.  It sounded nice but yuk, it was horrible.  No, don't blame my cooking this time, I didn't burn it, under cook it or do any of my other usual tricks.  It needed doctoring in some way to make it edible.  Now we have a tube of chicken stock with us so some of that went in to remove the blandness and then a load of chill - oooooo yummy, it really was a tasty dinner in the end and we even had some rabbit food with it, the remnants of our leafy green salad from the other day.  Feeling like we had eaten a dinner fit for kings we sat back in our luxury chairs and listened to the sounds of the evening, so peaceful until the frog chorus started up.  I am not kidding, the noise was unbelievable, not quite one of Mozart's or Handles symphonies but close enough and certainly stirring with it waves of loudness and murmurs along with several scales hit perfectly.  We did record it but the cameras have picked up other background noises so the end result does not do justice to the 'Froggy Chorus', but here it is anyway.

Time for me to sign off for the day (and my laptop needs charging, only a few minutes of battery power left).  As always, another sun set picture, this one taken of the suns reflection on a tree, hope you like it.