Day 6 Pildapa Rock to Norseman

---

Day 6
7am start again. As I was cleaning the camper floor before I fold the camper up I noticed some small droppings inside the camper. I still can’t find the critter and hoped that it left the camper that night. We drove pass Mucklamukla and saw the Kuhlman name on street in Ceduna. I fuelled up at Ceduna at 1.89/litre. Got a sms from Andre saying they left the Berverley Easter camp. I did my sums on the Kms left to do and realised I am going to be late for our Esperance destination. I really have to travel a lot of kms today but I still want to do a few sight seeing things on the Nullabor. The Nullabor were green. I expected white or red dust with little plants. We are outside whale season so I skipped the Head of the Bight whale watching centre. I turned into the next roadside stop that gave a vista of the The Great Australian Bight cliffs. Miles and miles of cliffs with no beaches. It was magnificent views. So far I have stopped in about 6 rest stops in SA and they were all filthy and badly kept. None had toilets. This really doesn’t give me much incentive to tour SA in my camper in the future. We reached Border Village and the quarantine checkpoint. We already made sure we didn’t have any fresh fruit and veg and honey with us so it was quick check over. Fuelled up at Eucla. Terrible service there with a guy who was rude. We reached Mudrabilla around 4pm. Decided to start cooking dinner there and eat on the road. We also paid $4pp for some hot showers. Mudrabilla was so windy that Mary couldn’t cook outside. So I had to open the camper and got Mary to cook inside. We didn’t leave Mundrabilla till about 5.30pm. Too much time was lost and I had to make it up. So almost the whole Nullabor on the WA side was driven in the dark. I couldn’t tell you what was worth looking at. We change our watches to match WA time. I didn’t realise that we had to wind back 45mins at Eucla and another 45 mins at Caiguna. I always thought that the whole WA runs on same time. I fuelled up at Caiguna at 1.99/litre. I took some of their free driver coffee, extra strong with 3 sugars. That coffee kept me up all night. Really felt awake after that coffee. I was going to head to each rest stop and see how I was feeling to decide whether to continue or not. I finally stopped 80kms East of Norseman on a rest stop there at 12am WA time. That means 1.30am Darwin time and been on the road for 18.5hours that day. It wasn’t too cold only about 16C that night, so I am thinking that the SW is not that miserably cold as I was expecting. As I was setting up the camper, I notice the critter for the first time. It was a mouse. I venture to believe this mouse hitch a ride with me since Ross River camp site. That place had plague proportions of these mice. I was too tired to bother catching him at 12am. I just hope it doesn’t crawl on me at night.

---