Crossing the Nullabor

We left Esperance at 8:30am and drove towards Norseman. This town was named after a horse. The story goes that a man was riding his horse through the area and it went lame. When he checked it's foot, he found a nugget of gold stuck in it's shoe! So the gold mining began after that.




We got some fuel and began the big drive. People kept telling us how boring it was going to be but we didn't think it was that bad. We have driven plenty of boring drives over the last 6 months and this wasn't the worst. It is just very long! We ate lunch in the car and stopped to refuel at Balladonia. We then managed to make it to Cocklebiddy for another refuel and pulled over about 60km east of Cocklebiddy at a roadside stop. What a drive. We managed 700km in one day, our record. We were in the car for 10 hours, only getting out once for an hour so it was a great effort from the kids. My heartfelt thanks goes out to Steve Jobs for inventing the iPod/iPad which made a big difference.




Watched our last WA sunset.




We had dinner and went to bed pretty quickly as there wasn't much around. While we were in bed we heard what sounded like some sort of animal outside. There were heaps of rustling noises so Michael and I looked out the window hoping to see a wombat or something interesting. Couldn't see anything in the dark. Then I felt what I thought was a moth brush my shoulder. And Michael felt something on his leg. And then something ran over his toes! We turned the lights on to find we had mice in the van. They had found two small holes next to our mattress and made their way into our bed. Well lucky for me Jack was still awake to help Michael get them out. They chased 2 out and killed another one. We plugged up any holes we could think of but I still couldn't go back to sleep. Which was lucky because about half an hour later I spotted another one. Jack was asleep by this time so Michael had to deal with it! The rest of the night we could hear them crawling all over the canvas bed ends and the roof so we didn't get a lot of sleep. We found out later there is a mouse plague and they are everywhere on the Nullabor. Wish we had known that earlier! We did better than some other people we met who unfortunately left a window down on their car and had them in there for the next few days.

We got underway by about 8 the next morning and got to Eucla, about 13km from the SA border and the kids got out for a bit of a play. Then we crossed the border. Bye bye WA.




There are a few scenic lookouts just over the border and this one at the Bunda Cliffs was very spectacular.




Our only other stop was at the Head of the Bight where we had to pay $10 to walk out on a couple of boardwalks. They charge this during whale watching season but it seemed a bit steep when there are no whales. There were some more good views of the Bunda Cliffs.




Not sure what Tom is doing in this photo! We had to stop at the Head of the Bight to make sure we were following the book "Are We There Yet?" which if you don't know it, is a story about a family traveling around Australia in a camper trailer.

We were pretty sick of driving by about 5pm so decided to stop at a little place called Fowler's Bay, about 20km off the highway. With the 2 hour time difference it meant a pretty late arrival but funnily enough there was still time for fishing and both Jack and Michael managed to catch some Tommy Rough (or Australian Herring) from the jetty.