Travel Time (including stops): 6 hours
Distance Travelled: 536 km
Number of Wedge-tail Eagles seen: 1
We had a lovely slow start this morning, hitting the road by 9 am. The trip was pretty uneventful, no wide loads blocking the roads, no feral goats and the only kangaroos we saw were road kill.
Our first stop was Kumarina, a roadhouse a couple hundred kilometres from Cue. It's on the banks of a dry riverbed.
It's hard to imagine water in the river, but flash floods are a real danger in winter.
Some of the courtesies you need to be aware of when travelling north are, firstly the two finger salute. Now I don't mean the rude 'up yours' salute, but rather lifting your index and middle finger from the steering wheel when you pass a car on the road and giving a little wave. It's a nice way of acknowledging your fellow traveller.
The other thing we learnt on this trip is the brief right indicator flick. The thing with travelling up north is there are a lot of huge trucks, road trains and caravans travelling on the roads, and it's hard to see past them if you want to overtake. So what these people generally do, is a brief flick of the right indicator light to let you know it's safe to pass. It's super handy.
After a brief stop for lunch, we travelled to Newman. Newman is a mining town through and through. If you weren't sure driving in, you'd be certain by your first look in the car park at the shopping centre with the number of utes, four-wheel drives and high-vis wearing people walking around. BHP has a mine right next to the town.
We headed up to the Radio Tower lookup which has an incredible view over the surrounding plains.
We are considering getting up early to watch the sunrise tomorrow, but I'm not promising anything!
Newman doesn't have a caravan park any more, so we're staying at the town oval which they've kind of converted into a park.
Tomorrow we'll be arriving in Karijini National Park where we'll stay a few nights. I'm looking forward to less driving!
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We went up there for sunset and it was lovely. They have a bunch of tables and a couple of barbecues so you can have a picnic while you watch the sun go down, or indeed the sun rise.
