Onslow was a great stop over with the park right on the ocean with nice sea breezes. The trade off from sitting outside enjoying the outlook was midge bites. I’m now covered in red welts and it’s taken 3 days for them to start to settle down. Onslow is a small township- mostly known internationally for its Paparazzi Dogs.
From the beach it is possible to view both the setting sun as well as the Stair Case to the Moon phenomenon where, at certain times of the year, the full moon rising over the tidal flats creates an optical illusion of a set of stairs rising from the horizon to the moon. The paparazzi dogs are waiting for the perfect shot. Apparently they went viral on social media, so they’re a big attraction. Apart from the dogs, there is a great pub where I had the nicest cooked meal in weeks. Generally the food on the road has been ordinary – limited menus(schnitzel, steak, fish), poor ingredients and poorly cooked. I imagine there’s better money to be made in the mines up here than in hospitality. However, I have great hopes for tonight. The park I am currently at cooks meals every night- tonight is the Sunday roast.
After leaving Onslow, I overnighted in Karratha and Port Hedland. These were both largely as I expected, industrial mining and port towns, so I didn’t bother hanging around. The main north / south highway merges with the A1 just south of Port Hedland, and as a consequence, there was immediately a lot more road trains on the road. Mostly they hoon along at over 100kph so I’m happy enough follow them along ( the speed limit is 110kph on the open roads). Moving north through the Pilbara, the terrain is becoming more diverse with some hillocks, rivers and a greater range of shrubbery. Yesterday I drove up to 80 mile beach for the weekend. This took me past the Pardoo roadhouse, demolished by the recent cyclone. The evidence of the cyclone was limited to an area of about 70 kms, so this place was pretty unlucky to be in the center of it. This is also an area where Greg and Aprile spent a year – I passed the turn off to Marble Bar.
Despite having said I would stay on bitumen, I made a slight detour yesterday along a dirt road down to my current park on the eighty mile beach. Beautiful beach. I sat with a guy named Rob last night watching the sun set and pondering mysteries of life such as (1) why is it illegal to pick up shells from this beach when you can drive along the beach and run your 4WD or quad bike over the top of them? (2)Why are there no enterprising teenagers who hang around caravan parks offering to empty toilet cassettes for $10 (3) the best places to drop a line when you’re beach fishing ( find a channel). Nice guy – he’s traveling with his wife and she does all the driving as he has Parkinson’s. They’ve come from up north, and crossed the river with their van at Fitzroy Crossing a couple of weeks ago – he says the roads and temporary crossing are all fine which is good to know.
Off to Broome tomorrow. My first appointment on Tuesday is to have the air con unit in the van replaced. This is my 3rd problem with it since I bought the van 3 years ago and both previous repairers said it was a load of rubbish so no surprises when the Broome guy said he wouldn’t bother fixing it and I would be better off replacing it. Anything for some working air con. Big afternoon planned watching the footy before my roast dinner.
Round about 