Heading South

Monday 31 August.

Left Mt Augustus this morning, heading south and homeward.

A fairly uneventful journey and arrived at Bilung Pool in time for lunch.

Amazing, we have never seen so much water in this pool. It looks really, really good. It is more crowded than we usually see here but we’re only staying the night and our parking site is pretty good.

As you can see I still don’t have control of the selfie-stick, hopefully it will come!

We did some satellite spotting before dinner tonight in a typical outback hemisphere of stars which I wish I knew how to photograph! Anyway, Venus is looking particularly good just now.

Heading south again today and so far we’ve been lucky with sunny days to keep the battery charged and the nights have not been too cold.

We’re well into wildflower country, the roadsides are looking spectacular and the colours are difficult to photograph and the dashcam doesn’t really do the task.

Our stop off tonight is a place called Ballinyoo Bridge, we’ve been here before while we were waiting to meet up with Brad and Denise. As an aside, they were late getting here because they couldn’t get across a cattle grid, a cow had got two of her hoofs stuck in the grid!

Anyway, today we had just arrived and found a couple of places to stop and who should rock up but Brad and Denise, who had gone a little further along the river to park. So for 2 at 5 we had a little group again.

Having discovered that it’s easier to use video for group shots …………………

Its getting colder in the evenings as we head south so we don’t hang around too long.

We plan to get home on Friday so we have a longish run down to Yandanooka where we will stop tonight.

Rain is forecast but so far we have been very lucky with clear blue skies.

Also in Mingenew we had to go in search of some special orchids, sadly, we were a bit too late and they had died off.

However, we did stop at a farm machinery yard to admire the equipment used these days.

At Yandanooka the evening drink assembly was a shortish one due to the dropping temperature!

Thursday 3rd September

The sun is still shining this morning.

A stop in Three springs to view the Chamberlin tractor! The government set up the Chamberlin tractor factory here in the thirties to provide work in the area. It was probably never very well managed and was eventually taken over by John Deere.

However, it probably made a big impact on the area and as with many country communities in WA has a ‘big’ something, in this case a tractor!

A vanilla slice stop in Moora before arriving in Mogumber, a very small community but which has a rather good pub which serves some good food. Since it is now quite chilly by late afternoon we decide on 2 at 5 in the pub and then dinner as it is our last night together. It was quite crowded in the pub as the ‘Dockers’ on of Perth’s AFL clubs was playing a critical game, – they lost!

Friday today and heading home but not before another vanilla slice stop on the way at Bindoon.

We part company here, we’ve been travelling together for eleven days, its been a good trip with good company.

After driving on country roads for the majority of the trip, the last 100ks on the Freeway in heavy traffic and a very strong side wind made it a fairly tiring day.

4,750 ks not a particularly long trip but very enjoyable and we look forward the next one.

If anyone is actually reading this, please feel free to suggest changes, improvements or any comments.