We found Kalgoorlie very interesting. The boys loved all the huge diggers and trucks. Below is called the Super Pit which is a massive open cut gold mine.
We decided this tray from an old dump truck would make a great swimming pool if we dug a hole in the backyard for it. It would take a lot of water to fill. We must have been feeling the heat. It was mid 30's on this day.
The truck has a dwarfing effect on our kids. Don't they look tiny?
Ben isn't even as tall as the width of the tyres used on the trucks.
Liam and Jake trying their hand at drilling in the underground gold mine. (only pretending) The drillers earn $100 per hour so we considered sending them off to work for the day.
We watched a gold pouring demonstration and handed around the end result. What a shame we didn't have a pocket big enough to slip this into. I've forgotten how much he said this was worth but he handed around an ounce of gold at the start which was the size of a pile of about 4x 10c coins and that was worth about $1,700. We all tried panning for gold and Liam found a couple of specks.
We drove from Kalgoorlie WA to Streaky Bay SA in 3 big days of driving. The boys are such seasoned travellers that there were no complaints or "Are we there yet?" On the first day they complained that we had reached our destination as they wanted to watch another DVD. There was a thunderstorm on the last night at Kalgoorlie that followed us all the way across the Nullarbor. When we got to the Bunda Cliffs and the head of bite it was raining so hard and so cloudy that there was no point in pulling over for the views.
The above photo is us at the end of the longest straight stretch of road in Australia-146.6kms. It luckily stopped raining long enough to take the photo.
We stayed the second night at the Nullarbor Roadhouse which had one of the many golf holes right next to where we camped. We met a few people on our travels who were playing golf across the Nullarbor. There are holes in Esperance, Kalgoorlie and all the way across the Nullarbor. The one above, and I assume the rest would be the same, was dirt with some fake grass for the green.
Sign at Nullarbor Roadhouse. We didn't see any camels or wombats but we saw many kangaroos. Most of them were the dead variety on the side of the road. One was sitting in the middle of our side of the road watching us driving towards it. I alerted Steve as I was not sure if he had noticed (he was in a trance driving the brain numbingly boring road) and he had to slow down to about 20km/h and beep the horn to get the silly roo to move. Talk about no road sense. No wonder there are so many dead ones on the side of the road.
The storm front arriving at Nullarbor Roadhouse. One tourist had parked his hired plane next to the camping area and tied it down to the ground which we thought was a good idea. He was on his way from Adelaide to the Pilbara Region WA.
We were very happy to arrive safe and sound to Streaky Bay SA. The caravan park is right on the foreshore and we are camping right next to my Dad and Daph who have joined us for a holiday for a week. We have enjoyed our relaxing week at Streaky and will move onto Port Lincoln tomorrow and Dad and Daph will start their journey back home. More about Streaky Bay in our next blog....
Sue.
No comments:
Post a Comment