Home                                                                                                        UPDATE 19 AUGUST

Have decided that cruising at 90 - 95 kmh is the way to go. This gives pretty good fuel consumption (about 7.5 l/ 100km. This increases by about 1.5 l/ 100km if you travel at 110 kmh. Mobile phone coverage is very patchy. It seems OK in the major centres but in between there is often nothing at all. I won't make my Telstra statement again!! Got well and truly caught out by the weather at Elliston. Heavy rain and very strong winds.

The weather had cleared up by the next day so I was off again. I always seem to be leaving the Caravan Parks later than I should because someone comes up to take a photo of the car or have a chat about it. If I had a dollar for every photograph that was taken or every "what is it?", I would have paid for the trip already.

There are so many beautiful "sea change" towns along the coast. Venus bay was another of them. Near Streaky Bay I stopped off and saw "Murphies Haystacks". These are a series of weathered rock formations appearing in the middle of clear farmland.

When I was leaving the Streaky bay Caravan Park I was held up for a while  by someone videoing the car and giving a running commentary at the same time on the audio system. At Ceduna I received a text message on my phone from Graeme and Pat Umlauf, fellow clubbie owners from Adelaide. They were in Kalgoorlie and we organised to meet somewhere along the track in a few days time. I gave Clemmie a wash here and she was looking quite smart for a change. I headed off for the Head of the Bight in drizzly weather but it only dampened the top of my cloth helmet. My clothes remained quite dry.

At the Head of the Bight I saw about a dozen whales. Most were mothers with calves.

I made it to the SA/WA border at Border Village for the night. It rained all night and I had to break camp in the rain which was no fun. Fuel was 154.1 cents per litre and after filling and getting ready to go I had to open up everything for a quarantine inspection. Typical bureaucrat inspector. she wouldn't have smiled if you had told her the joke of the year! I drove about 200km in the rain. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable and I didn't get very wet but I needed a towel to wipe the inside of the windscreen periodically. Between Border Village and Norseman most of the "towns" marked on the map are in fact nothing but road houses. I covered 727 km for the day and did it quite comfortably.

Road trains have not posed the problem I thought they would. They create a blast of spray if it is raining and a fair draft but if you are prepared for it there is no problem. I thought I was doing the trip in a fairly basic manner until I met 2 guys riding pushbikes from Perth to Sydney. They were pretty well organized and planned on averaging 170 km per day. The night at Norseman was dry but freezing cold and in the morning the tarp over the car was a solid sheet of ice.

Norseman was named after a horse who is reputed to have pawed the ground and dislodged some gold bearing quartz. There is a sculpture of him on one of the street corners.

The old mining towns have very wide streets and these were made that way because the camel trains which transported most of the supplies for the mines and the miners had a very large turning circle and the streets had to allow for this. The town of Norseman has recognized this by placing a series of sculptures on a roundabout in one of the streets.