Wednesday 6th June 2018
It is a beautiful sunny day, blue skies and very peaceful as I sit here at Drysdale River Station, a couple of hundred kilometres from our next adventure.

Happy birthday to my eldest son Gavin, 35 years ago today you graced us with your presence. It’s times like today when i am away from family that I realise how much I love you and miss you all. Not long now till we are home.

It is 9.30am and the campground is pretty much deserted, campers have been milling out slowly since about 7.30am as the road to Mitchell Falls is apparently very rough. About a five hour drive for only 190km.

David’s thoughts on this are that if you aren’t first in the line you may as well be last by a long way as you are only going to be stuck in a cloud of dust. So as luck would have it, we were up early and would like to have started out early, but a little maintenance was required on the handbrake as it had rattled totally loose. It was at the topmost range possible before it doesn’t work. So fix it we must.

So I sit here watching and enjoying the peacefulness of our surroundings (whilst DB lies under the car) pondering our last 8 weeks adventure. Last night I was reminded of the New Norcia monks, that seems so long ago. That was one of our first stops after leaving Perth.

Since then we have stayed in some amazing places, on cliff tops, on farmstays, on stations, by the river, and in a couple of very squeezey caravan parks. Lucky for us the latter has been seldom. We sure do love the serene, wide expanses. Just drive in to a campground and keep driving till you are past all the other campers then setup camp. Don’t mind how far it is from the amenities until the morning. Just deal with that in the morning. I could have left half my clothes behind and one day I will work that out. All you need is 2 shorts, 2 long pants, 3 t-shirts, 2 long sleeve shirts, 6 undies, 3 pairs socks and a hat. That would have left my bag half empty and a lot easier to manage. Oh well, one day we can only hope!

Anyway, we have also enjoyed bush walks, mountain climbs, river crossings, swims in gorges, rivers and pools. Seen crocodiles, kangaroos, wallabies, emus, trillions of birds and the most amazing scenery. It has been one hell of an adventure so far with another couple of weeks to go. Can’t wait for the rest.

Well an hour later one wheel is now done and he is on to the next one. After me going to see if we could borrow a trolley jack he has done it without one. Typically leaving me to ask the question and then moving on without it. Oh well, love him to bits especially as he is so capable of the fix. Thank goodness. The second side has taken only 5 minutes as he learnt how to do it on the first one. DB said a manual would have been good, it took an hour to do the first one and 5 minutes for the second one. Also the last minute jack stand has been a saviour. Oh well, now I had better hurry and go and ring Gavin for his birthday. Will fill you in on the rest of the day later.

we headed on our way at about 11am, we should still have time to get there in the light and hopefully we will not catch up to the slow caravan or campers. It is suggested you don’t tow anything on this road and they offer a free storage at Drysdale for campers and caravans. We will see how many people heed that advise when we get there. There has been numerous reports saying how bad the road is and that you should just fly in. With David’s aversion to flying we only have one option, DRIVE. We decided to leave the bikes behind which will mean our bike rack stays in tact.

The first 2 hours was a very easy drive about 80km an hour and the road was quite good. We obviously slowed down for the many creek crossings. We had lunch just after going through our longest water crossing yet, the King Edward River. From there the road was still reasonable for another hour then 30-40km out from the Mitchell Falls camp ground the ruts were really bad and it took another 2hours to get here. Slow and steady wins the race, we hoped. We arrived at about 3.30pm with plenty of light to spare. Yay Us!

After choosing campsite we headed to check out the helicopter options for tomorrow. I will let you know the decision on that one tomorrow.