Barn Hill Station

We had a few spots of rain overnight and the red dirt has become even stickier than before. Now that we've been in the red (so to say) for nearly a week everything has a red tinge. The red dust from the road even penetrates the caravan windows and sits on the inside of the van. We're using our annex matt under the awning to give us a "clean" area before we enter the caravan.

This morning started out overcast with a few raindrops but by 8am it was partially sunny as we drove the 20km dirt track back to the highway. Back on the highway we headed North, towards Broome, for another 15km and then turned West onto a 10km dirt track into Barn Hill station.

Barn Hill is fairly small station with only 43,000 acres where they run about 5000 head of Brahmen destined for the live export market in Indonesia. On the 10km track into the station we saw many caravans heading out. When we arrived at the caravan park section, just on 9am, we expected plenty of sites but to our surprise we got the only available powered site! Alan, who was just behind us, had to take unpowered and ended up right on the other end of the park. Powered sites have only 6 Amps available, just enough to run the basics but no Kettle or Aircon.

We've stayed at Barn Hill on our last trip and I seem to remember that it wasn't anywhere near as large as it is now. I'm not sure how many sites they've got, but I'd say between 100 and 200. The unpowered areas have generators in use and ca be a bit noisy at times.

Typical Broome weather now with 30 DegC during the day and nice warm evenings. Although yesterday was a bit cool with only 25 DegC due the cloud. The close proximity to Broome (about 100km on the road) also means that we can get patchy phone reception in certain area. Back at Port Smith I had to drive to a small hill and stand on car to get phone reception but here it seems to be quite good near the beach.

We got freshly baked bread from the station for lunch and spent the afternoon lazying around - can't do too much in this heat!

Later in the afternoon we ventured to the west facing beach and admired the glorious colours of the sun setting over the indian ocean.