We woke to a rather cold morning at Mundrabilla where a cold easterly had started up during the night. The new time zone introduced a bit more confusion as the road houses run on their own time zone which is somewhere between WA (WST) and SA (CST) time, a difference of 1h 30min.
The first argument of the day was about what time zone to use for our 7am getting up. The sun was up at 5:30 but we finally left Mundrabilla at 7:15.
Now that we are in WA, we don't necessarily get a water connection at caravan parks so we always travel with full water tanks in the caravan.
The first stop was at Madura Road House where we also purchased a loaf of [frozen] bread for the princely sum of $5.50 before moving a bit further up to the lookout at the top of the Madura pass.
A quick stop and a few photos and then onto Cocklebiddy Road House to feed the car with Diesel and the family with a few cakes for morning tea. A bit further up the road, at Caiguna, we stopped to admire the sign which signifies the start of the "90 Mile Straight", Australia's Longest Straight Road (Photo). For the next 146km there was indeed not even the slightest hint of a bend in the road, we drove for nearly 1.5hrs in a straight line.
We did spot a number of Emus, Eagles and other birds on the side of the road.
The distances between refuelling stops out here are 180kms, so with our limited range of 350km we had to put a bit of thought into planning our refuelling stops.
A few more km's along the road we pulled into Balladonia Road House for refuelling and a quick lunch before continuing on another 90km's to Fraser Range Station.
This old sheep station covers some 437,000 acres with 160km between its Northern and Southern boundary. Dry land farming in this part of the country requires 27 acres per head of sheep and this huge property has 150,000 acres of grazing country which supports around 5,500 head of sheep.
There is no phone, television or radio out here (except satellite) and one gets to appreciate the long range of the good old AM transmitters which are luckily still in operation with the ABC. Without these we'd be totally cut off from the outside world.
Travelling in our modern car with it poor AM reception our only entertainment in the car is from audio books and the UHF two way where we listen and talk to other travellers and truckies.
The biggest wide load we encountered on the trip across was a 5.5.mt wide mining truck which took up 80% of the available road width. The pilot vehicles are very good at getting everyone off the road and giving radio advise on the upcoming obstacle.
Today we have also heard of the bad weather which has struck the west of the country with flooding rains and a Tornado somewhere near Perth. They received 30mm of rain - apparently that's one third of the total rainfall this year. They are still in real drought in part of the country.
Here is the link to today's travel map.
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