Our plan was to fuel up at Fortescue Road house after departing Onslow, before stopping at Miaree Pool for lunch (just before Karratha), then continuing on to Peawah, a free overnight camp. Our stop at Miaree Pool, a place we love, would have allowed for a leisurely lunch, and would get us into Peawah around mid afternoon. The plan was in keeping with our commitment to a more leisurely paced trip. However, we arrived at Fortescue Road house only to discover it’s now closed down. Mmmm! Would our fuel hold out till we reached Karratha – we weren’t sure!

We thought it would, but as we watched the fuel gauge needle dropping we started to have our doubts. Miaree Pool came nearer but it would have meant an extra couple of kms to pull into the place, and the extra fuel needed when re-starting the car to continue on our journey. We carried on by. Karratha was getting closer, but the needle on the fuel gauge was dropping lower, as was our speed. With the fuel warning light flashing we limped into a fuel station on the highway at around 60kmh, with the realisation that we either need to consider fitting a long range fuel tank, or travelling with not one, but two Jerry cans of additional diesel in the future. A small hiccup like a closed down road house can spell disaster when travelling in outback Australia if you’re not prepared.

Rather than stopping to make our salad for lunch, we instead bought our first pie of our trip. Our commitment to more leisurely paced travel includes a plan for taking the time to stop and make a healthy lunch rather than eating overpriced junk food purchased from road houses on the way. Never mind, ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’. We continued on to Peawah.

I can’t remember what time we arrived, but it was earlier than planned. We’ve never stayed at Peawah roadside camp before, but we have friends that often stay there. We found a place to park up for the night, popped the roof on the van, and put our outside chairs in the shade. We had quite a bit of open area behind our van for Tilz to be able to wander around in the red dirt without fear of getting in the way of fellow travellers. Five minutes later, Tilz was limping. Investigation showed a multitude of double gee prickles lodged between his paw pads, in his tail, in fact, everywhere. Mmmm – one of those down his ear was something we definitely didn’t want to risk. With our earlier arrival, we had a rethink. A couple more hours of travel would get us to the cleaner and tidier De Grey overnight camp, a favourite stopover place we’ve used many times in the past. We re-packed the chairs, pulled the roof top down, removed all the double gees from Tilz, and settled in for a longer day in the car.

De Grey is a huge camp site with room for hundreds of rigs. Most times we’ve found the long drop toilets there to be clean, (once they let us down), but this time they were spotless. We had a wander around, had dinner (cold roast beef and salad), a few games of cards, and hit the sack early. The next morning we awoke to a pleasantly warm, but very misty morning. It was just gorgeous.

We went for long walk around the area with Tilz, watching the sun come up breaking through the mist. Mist covered cobwebs dotted the areas of scrub reminding me of a wind farm, there were so many of them. It had been very worthwhile having the longer day that took us on as far as De Grey, it was quite beautiful.

Distance travelled: 600kms

Fuel per litre: $2.26

Total fuel including re-filling our one and only Jerry can $185