13 October 2024
We left early in the morning from Esperance, the departure point we’d chosen for our Nullarbor Crossing. After taking on breakfast at McDonald’s, we headed north to Norseman.
Norseman was as we remembered it (that’s not a compliment), so we simply emptied the toilet cassette and turned east.
We were in good spirits and looking forward to making the most of any sightseeing opportunities. And … there weren’t many.
Our first stop was at the Balladonia Roadhouse, made famous as the landing point for Skylab in 1979. This is despite NASA planning Skylab’s reentry “over remote South Africa”. As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much.”
Just down the road we reached 90 Mile Straight, regarded as the longest straight stretch of road in Australia and one of the longest in the world. We took the opportunity for some photos — where Nicole clearly succeeded in one-upping me on poses — then started out on this long, straight stretch.
With not much to stop to look at, a frequent topic of conversation was where we were going to stop for “comfort” and/or leg stretch breaks.
We took advantage of all the roadhouses, with Caiguna Roadhouse being one of these.
We looked up another rest stop with a toilet and pulled in. As we got out, a fellow who was near the toilet block (very primitive and only one ‘cubicle’) came straight over and half jokingly said, “Join the queue.” We were in no hurry and so started up the usual conversation around where we were each headed. We’d been chatting for over 10 minutes when the guy we were chatting to said, “I don’t know what he’s still doing in there.” We waited a further 5 minutes before Nicole and I decided to give it away for two reasons; a) we didn’t need to go that badly anyway, and b) we weren’t sure if we wanted to go in after he was in there for that long. Enough said on that experience.
Later on we stopped at this place that was marked as having a picnic table. Well, I guess you’d call that a picnic table …
It’d been a fairly long day of driving, and so our thoughts now turned to where to free camp that night. We haven’t done very much free camping at all on this trip, and so were determined to give it a go this time. After consulting WikiCamps (a very handy app) we chose three possibilities around Cocklebiddy. We slowed upon approaching Option 1, straining to find the dirt track entry, and saw it just as I drove past. You have to turn straight off the 100km/h highway with heaps of road trains belting along, so you need to be a bit careful with U-turns. We drove further to find somewhere to turn around. 8km or so down the road we decided to bail on Option 1 and try for Option 2.
We did successfully find the entry to Option 2 and headed in. After a very rocky entry we found a nice option. Nicole’s comment was, “It’s been a long day, let’s just camp here.” After parking, we got out to fine tune where exactly we would park, then were swarmed by horse flies. We’ve both been bitten by these monsters before and didn’t like it much, so we decided to bail on Option 2 and head for Option 3.
Option 3 was just east of Cocklebiddy Roadhouse, so we stopped at the Roadhouse to suss out a potential Option 4 if needed.
Moving on, we turned into Option 3 and felt good about it. There were two other vans there plus 4G mobile coverage, both of which added to the safety factor, so we committed to a spot. While there were still quite a few flies around, they weren’t monster flies. Winner!
So we set up, started a fire, and enjoyed the serenity.
As we saw the sun dropping to the horizon, we cooked our dinner on the BBQ (in case the killer mozzies arrived early) and headed inside for a pretty early night after a long but good day. And so ended Day 1 on the Nullarbor.
← ← Previous · Contents · Next →