Broome & Beyond: beyond...

Monday 17th July

Once again, Deb & I are up before the alarm. Six am. We want to make sure that Deb gets to the airport on time; she flies home today. Up, breakfast, pack, load truck... and we still have two hours to spare :-)

We stall for a while. Then it's off to the airport. Deb checks in. There's still more than an hour till her plane leaves Broome. I have a long drive ahead of me so I abandon Deb at Broome airport... We've said goodbye, anything else is anticlimax.

My first stop is at a garage to re-inflate the tyres. I let just a bit of air out, for the Cape Leveque Road. Now they are back to "highway pressure"... rock hard. I'll see how it runs, I may adjust the pressure if it's too hard when the day warms up. For now it's back to almost as hard as post-service. Which reminds me...

I took the truck in for service just a couple of weeks ago. With specific instructions that it needed to be all good for a long drive. Niggles noticed so far:

... Air con blows cool but not cold

... Steering pulls slightly to the left

... Fuel guage says half full when it's much more than half gone

And -- nothing to do with the last service:

... When I sit up straight -- which I prefer for long drives -- the mirror is facing too low. It won't shift up. The mirror is part of the reversing camera installation.

... Again, sitting up straight, the sun visor -- pushed forward -- blocks my view. It's the only annoying thing about the "as manufactured" Prado !

There, glad to get all that off my chest :-)

I leave Deb at Broome airport. I leave Broome. Two days here & two days there worked very well. We'd have been stir crazy if we had all week in Broome... Well, I would have read & slept but Deb would have driven me crazy by wanting to do something... anything :-)

I find a geocache ! At Deep Creek, by the side of the road. I notice that it's just at the time when Deb will be taking off... There's an empty passenger seat and an half-empty back seat where Deb's case should be... Sigh... Ah well.

Another geocache! At a 24-hour stop. A few people there, with caravans. One poor couple are having their car loaded onto a truck. I'm sure their car is not a Prado... :-)

Lots of traffic on the road, mostly heading towards Broome. I'm going slowly but still not many cars pass me from the Broome direction. It's the great migration south.

There's the geocache stop. Then a truck bay. Then a large abattoir in the middle of what seems to be nowhere !

There's a large boab close to the road. Knocked about a bit, holes in it, showing signs of being within reach of the road? Anyway, that's the first... and there are regular boab sightings from then on.

Derby -- and its three or four caches -- is less than fifty km due west. Once again, I will bypass Derby. I stop for a break at Willare Roadhouse. It's familiar!

This is where I spent a night on my last trip north. Upstairs, a room with a verandah on one side and a corridor to the shared ablutions on the other. When I left the light on my bed -- under the light -- was thick with little black beetles. And my first sighting of an enormous expanding truck-trailer-caravan was in the caravvan area outside... But that was years ago.

Today I have a pie and coffee. Free coffee for the driver! First time I've actually been asked if I'm the driver.  So I'm sitting outside, under a shady shelter, enjoying a break.

The day started cool in Broome. At 10:30 the temperature reached 30 and I changed into shorts. Now it's a few degrees warmer and very comfortable. In the shade :-)

Time to drive on...

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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Consulting Dexitroboper
Agamedes Consulting / Problems? Solved.
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"Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky." - Michel de Montaigne

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