Up at 6am again and packed and on the road by 8.  Starting to sound familiar?

Blake’s run of luck was continuing with him banging his head (really well) getting in and out of places three times.  He also managed to stub his toe … yep … THAT toe.

Today we had 550 kms to do to get us to Eighty Mile Beach.  The road was a little unknown, with some maps saying that sections were still unsealed.  It turned out to be bitumen all the way on spectacular and later, boring, road until the turn off to Eighty Mile Beach.

We were making good progress as it was all downhill.  Karajini is about 800m up and Port Hedland, funnily enough, is at sea level.  Speed was good, road was good and we were chatting about the huge road trains that were on this road.  There were heaps of them!  Plenty of oversize ones too that made us pull right over.  Many of them were the largest 4 trailer kind too.  Unfortunately one of them chucked a rock at us and we’ve now got an 8 inch crack in the screen that continues to grow…

[youtube https://youtu.be/uMGsyZUJxZw]

This all happened just out of Port Hedland and luckily they’ve got a windscreen shop.  Unfortunately, they didn’t have a Prado, rain sensor one in stock.  I did a bit of running around and have hopefully arranged to get one shipped to Broome to get installed while we’re there.  I should be able to confirm this all tomorrow via landline, as we’re now out of mobile range again for a few days.

Ouch!

Kel had her heart set on spending our extra night in Broome, to see the stairway to the moon.  A ring around all the parks soon showed that this wasn’t going to happen though.  We can either stay 3 nights at Eighty Mile Beach or possibly go a little further and have a night at Barn Hill Station too.

The rest of the journey into Eighty Mile Beach was uneventful.  We were getting a little anxious though as there were quite a few vans coming the other way … too many and too late in the day.  The next stop South would be Port Hedland some 2 hours away.  Surely they’re not being turned away from Eighty Mile Beach…

Our fears only got worse when we saw a van turn out of the access road and yet another passed us on the way in … not looking good.

Kel went into the reception area with a heavy heart but came back all smiles.  They were full on powered sites, but still had plenty of unpowered and generator sites.  We will end up moving tomorrow to a powered site though.  All good!  I guess the other vans just had to have a powered site.

We sent the kids off to suss out the beach while we did the setup.  They hadn’t come back by the time we were done, so we went in search of them thinking that maybe they were silly enough to have gone for a swim or something.

We needn’t have worried.  The tide was out even further than when we were at New Beach.  I’ll try and measure it tomorrow, but it’d be a kilometre easily.  With the beach exposed you can see billions of shells.  Some have snails in them and others have hermit crabs in them, so you get more than you bargain for sometimes while collecting the pretty ones.

You can drive along the beach here too, so we’ll likely do a bit of that tomorrow and find somewhere to relax and soak up some rays.  The fisherman are all pretty keen here and with high tide expected around 11am it may be pretty busy on the beach, but we’ll see.  I may even be persuaded to chuck in a line myself as there are good reports from the fishos.

Dinner for us was chicken burgers … while everybody else had fish … grrr

Sleeping on the windscreen issue has made me think that we should just put in a basic, cheap windscreen … since we’ll likely smash another one.  Then get the rain sensor version whacked in once we get back home.  I’ll try and have a chat with insurance in the morning.

[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/2011-08-15.gpx”]