After a week of not driving the rig, enjoying 7 days visiting with Peta, Chelsea and Aub and the many attractions of this Pilbara tourist hotspot, this morning we bid a fond farewell to the City of Karratha, with its ever-changing lights; from green, to amber, to red and back to green again!
A week off is a long time in caravanning terms.
But for this greenhorn automobilist it was a testing first, confronting the wind tunnel test, 25 kilometre an hour head winds with occasional bursts to 35 km an hour and the odd life threatening wily-wily hiding in the creek bed crossings.
Added to this I found the ‘4 on the floor’ syndrome quite exciting. An eye-popping single file row of 4 x four trailer road trains zooming past in the opposite direction, stealing my rip-roaring head winds. The only answer was to quickly duck under the dash board.
Further enhanced excitement comes with the approximate 18 litres of fuel per 100 kms and a Falcon fuel tank capacity that has the chauffeur gingerly sucking in every known bodily sphincter in the hope that all will be well in the long run.
And speaking of sphincters, today we actually passed Jason’s new iron horse rail project for Roy Hill with workers beavering away in a yard appropriately named “flash butt welding yard”.
Port Hedland is housing and shopping precincts surrounding a giant iron ore shipping plant, with coffee served at Dome, a former hospital nursing quarters ( reminiscent of Rottnest bungalows of the 1950’s) and from which you can see at least a couple of huge ships passing for every cup of flat white.
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