Heading eastwards towards home

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Day 58 – Sunday 26^th August – Perth to Boondi Rock in Goldfields National Park (40km W of Calgardie)

It had been another cool night and the tent was damp with dew outside and condensation inside, so we left the tent to dry out while we went to pick up Luke and watch Rory play in his under 10 footy match. We left the oval at around 10.30 after having said our farewells to the Dawsons. We needed to get fuel and some shopping before we left so drove to the local shopping centre. Coincidentally today is the first day of legal Sunday trading in WA so there was nothing standing in our way to get what we needed - apart from the supermarket not opening until 11am.

Back at the caravan park the tent was nice and dry so we packed it away and headed out of Perth at 12.30. It has been a flying visit but has given us an impression of the place. We will certainly be back some time and use Perth as a base for exploring the Margaret River area and other areas in the South. We are now officially on our way home and have 5 ½ days to drive over three thousand kilometers back to Black Rock in Victoria. Rox had said we really should go to Kalgoorlie to have a look at the gold mine “superpit” on our way to Esperance, so we headed directly East along the Goldfields Highway into the historic gold mining country.

We have been driving next to the longest water pipeline in the world, which was constructed around 100 years ago by the gold prospectors and incredibly seems to still be in use. Trucking along at a steady 100kms we managed to drive around 500kms this afternoon until we stopped at the great little Boondi Rock campsite in the Goldfields National Park, about 80kms before Kalgoorlie. Surprisingly we were the only people at the campsite, which was only a few kms off the main road and had long drop toilets and proper fire places. We popped up the tent just before it got dark and prepared a chicken salad dinner again (those roast chickens from the supermarket are so convenient!). However we had to abandon eating dinner outside due to a plague of flying beasties that dive bombed us, the table and the food. They looked a bit like fruit flies and they didn’t bite. But there were millions of them and they were pretty grim. Even the smoke from the campfire didn’t keep them away so we gave up sitting outside and retired to the tent where Luke had already been asleep for an hour, exhausted after his sleepover with Rory. For only the second time this trip Mark and I watched a movie in bed on the laptop before going to sleep.

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