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Published: December 23rd 2009
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Day 237 - Peg 133k (Australian Great Head of Bight, Eyre Highway) to Elliston
We had a fairly broken nights sleep last night due to the howling wind, that will teach us for parking on top of a cliff on the Southern Ocean. Have we learned nothing! Darryl got up in the middle of the night to let our pop up roof down as the wind was blowing it around so much making a right racket.
Not to worry, day three of our Nullarbor trek dawned bright and breezy and we knew that tonight we’d be sleeping in the confines of a caravan park somewhere on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. Today our 84 day journey through Western Australia really comes to an end. With tongue in cheek, tell all your friends it’s a terrible place so that they will all go to the East of Australia and we can have the West to ourselves when we return! When we come to do a review of our journey it will more than likely feature very heavily, from the top to the bottom it’s just gorgeous absolutely blooming gorgeous.
We pass through the Nullarbor proper this morning. The
stretch of treeless plain was the prompt for the name derived originally from the latin words Nullas Abor meaning ‘no trees’. In a funny kind of way it’s beautiful and very eye catching. This section has hidden beauty too, one of Australia’s most famous (apparently) surfing beaches is off road from here. Cactus Beach is just south of Penong and has great surfing breaks and the map actually advertises a surfboard factory so that’s a definite stop for the Elliotts when they come this way as Nige will be desperate for a decent surf by then.
108 kms short of Ceduna our car, PIE, reaches a new milestone or should that be kilometre stone as the odometer clicks over to 200’000. It’s a significant birthday but there’s no time to stop for cake.
We reach Ceduna having scoffed the last of our fruit and veg en-route and successfully pass our quarantine check. Lovely chaps there, they look very healthy and full of Vitamin C! Only joking, obviously they can’t consume any unwanted fruit or veg, they’re on the wrong side of the border.
In Ceduna we stopped at the visitors information to see what they could tell
us about Lincoln National Park which is where we’re hoping to spend a few days over Christmas. Our main concern is that it’s a dirt road going into the park and that it will be badly corrugated. The chap here was very helpful and gave us some great leaflets but as always the best thing to do is to call those closest to the park as they will have the up to date information. Whilst I was here I should have also picked up our certificate for the Nullarbor crossing but it slipped my mind. Not to worry, we know that we’ve crossed it which is probably the main thing so we’ll just give ourselves a certificate of photographs and memories!
There’s still a lot of the day left but not enough for us to make the journey straight to Lincoln National Park so we need to do an over night stop somewhere. Decisions, decisions! Initially we decide to head for Gawler Ranges but then just at the last minute I change my mind and we head towards Elliston instead, no idea why but it just felt like the right thing to do.
We had to detour a
bit further along the highway as there had been an accident so for about 7kms we were on a decent dirt road until we rejoined the highway just short of Streaky Bay. The coast line along here does look stunning and we toy with the idea of staying a night in Venus Bay but instead plump for the caravan park in Elliston. It’s lovely, sparse, simple, not at all crowded and very quiet. The lady who checks us in is a hoot and I can tell she thinks Darryl’s nuts but it’s been a long drive and he’s not seen humans for a while!!
We have a nice stroll down to the beach, there’s a chilly wind coming in from the ocean and the waves are crashing about but it was nice just to wander around and not be in the caravan or the car or sitting!
Fair to say we’re both knackered today and are longing for a good nights sleep. Here’s hoping!
Dar and Sar
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