Great Places and Great Spaces
After 16 days on the open road…5,200 km road trip from Broom to Perth in Western Australia, Australia’s wild west, over 16 days we know why they call Australia the land of great places and great spaces if we didn’t know it before.
The map shows 24 hour petrol stations and homesteads instead of cities. And the road signs show the next town or station every 10kms. At least we weren’t headed to the part of the map that said “warning there is no fuel available here”.
Whilst our destinations were amazing we spent whole days in between driving to the next spot… with nothingness in between. The outback landscape in between was so red and dry and flat.
The other road signs we saw were for cattle and kangaroo crossings and we saw a lot…alive and dead! Although the cows that were alive were looking quite a bit drab. Driving after dark is probably not advised here. I got my Roo! and Cow! calls down pat but I need to work on the Water!
Although it is winter and dry season here (which makes Broom and the Outback bearable) there was a day of heavy downpour and flash floods which happily arrived on one of our driving days. We have to take a 250k detour unfortunately as we couldn’t cross the roads…there are so many flood plains here that they don’t bother building bridges. So with our detour, we were driving a little late in the dark, went over a hill, and WHAM…landed right in the middle of a river…thankfully we pulled out the other side, kicked the front of the car back in, let the engine dry out and drove very very slowly the rest of the night.
We decided to camp it for most of the time as 16 days of hotels add up pretty quickly…at least until we got south enough that the cold would kick Katie back in doors. Little did we realise how harsh the outback can be….no grassy lawns for the tent, nothing except red rock gravel. However, we quickly discovered a whole new world…the campervan world. You are either a) a retiree driving across Australia or b) taking your ten year service leave and driving across Australia. (Here in Australia they have an amazing law, whereby if you work 10 years for a company you must get 3 paid months off!...its from back in the old days when it took that long to take a boat back to England.) Either way, you travel in style…satellite tv, fridge, and a tent as big as a house that extends from your campervan. We met a lot of interesting people that had a lot more time on their hands than us but we also felt like the little man on the totem pole when we pulled out our little two person tent for the night. At least no matter where we went we found campervan parks with great facilities.
The map shows 24 hour petrol stations and homesteads instead of cities. And the road signs show the next town or station every 10kms. At least we weren’t headed to the part of the map that said “warning there is no fuel available here”.
Whilst our destinations were amazing we spent whole days in between driving to the next spot… with nothingness in between. The outback landscape in between was so red and dry and flat.
The other road signs we saw were for cattle and kangaroo crossings and we saw a lot…alive and dead! Although the cows that were alive were looking quite a bit drab. Driving after dark is probably not advised here. I got my Roo! and Cow! calls down pat but I need to work on the Water!
Although it is winter and dry season here (which makes Broom and the Outback bearable) there was a day of heavy downpour and flash floods which happily arrived on one of our driving days. We have to take a 250k detour unfortunately as we couldn’t cross the roads…there are so many flood plains here that they don’t bother building bridges. So with our detour, we were driving a little late in the dark, went over a hill, and WHAM…landed right in the middle of a river…thankfully we pulled out the other side, kicked the front of the car back in, let the engine dry out and drove very very slowly the rest of the night.
We decided to camp it for most of the time as 16 days of hotels add up pretty quickly…at least until we got south enough that the cold would kick Katie back in doors. Little did we realise how harsh the outback can be….no grassy lawns for the tent, nothing except red rock gravel. However, we quickly discovered a whole new world…the campervan world. You are either a) a retiree driving across Australia or b) taking your ten year service leave and driving across Australia. (Here in Australia they have an amazing law, whereby if you work 10 years for a company you must get 3 paid months off!...its from back in the old days when it took that long to take a boat back to England.) Either way, you travel in style…satellite tv, fridge, and a tent as big as a house that extends from your campervan. We met a lot of interesting people that had a lot more time on their hands than us but we also felt like the little man on the totem pole when we pulled out our little two person tent for the night. At least no matter where we went we found campervan parks with great facilities.
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