Rick and Rae's Travels: Sat, 9th July

Yesterday actually marked day 150 on the road (5 months). It was extremely windy during the night so we were awake early and left Lake Argyle at 7:30am WA time. We said goodbye to Steve and Linda and Kevin and Faye (SL & KF) and went to the dump point within the park to empty the cassette toilet. By the time we drove back past our site on the way out (approx 15 mintues). someone had already staked a claim to our site by putting their chairs and table on it. They must have been watching and waiting for us to leave. We drove the short 7kms to the NT border and immediately lost 1.5 hours. Hopefully now it won't be dark at 5:30pm. We were surprised to see the 130km speed sign once we crossed the border.

We stopped at a little town called Timber Creek and had our lunch. While there, the others (SL & KF) caught up to us and we travelled ahead as a group, looking along the way for somewhere suitable to spend the night. We suddenly heard Kevin on the radio up ahead warn of some pigs on the road. When we rounded the next bend there were around 6 or 7 huge, black wild pigs splattered all over the road. A road train must have come across them during the night.

We stopped further on at the Victoria River Roadhouse and Caravan Park (in the middle of nowhere) and decided it was good value at $20 per night for power and water and well away from the road. We also had mobile phone and internet but no TV reception. Parked adjacent to the roadhouse was a small helicopter advertising scenic flights over the Coolibah cattle station made famous on the TV show 'Keeping Up With the Joneses'.

Rick and Steve spent a couple of hours watching the end of the V8 races (Steve has a satellite TV dish) while the rest of us sat around for a pleasant chat enjoying the extra hour of daylight.