Tell you what. If you ever decide to drive from anywhere in Australia to Perth….be prepared. Pick your driving partner carefully (thankfully mine is the same brand of weird as me) and load up audio books, songs and whatever else you think you need to help you stay sane. As Scar says…Be Prepared! Except in this case you aren’t taking over Simba’s birthrite, you are instead driving 2700 kilometres across some of the most interestingly bland country full of a shit load of NOTHING!
This is my version. We started in Adelaide at 7am. The car fully loaded and packed with our whole lives. Preparing to make one of the Great Migrations that seems to attract way too many retired caravaners. While it was 3 days of 10 hour plus driving, it was totally worth it. Whales are something I never thought I would see on the long drive over. We infact saw about 20 of them in the great bight. They are far larger than I remembered. Like honestly huge. They apparently hang out in the Bight because its fairly safe, there’s absolutely nothing there and their little calfs (which are also the size of a bloody 4 wheel drive) can learn to live in peace. It was just amazing to take a small 20 minute detour to see these incredible monsters of the sea. When you seem them its not hard to imagine where all the myths of magical creatures of the sea came from.
I digress. We spent three days trekking across our beautiful country to make it to Perth where the other half was born and raised. I am currently sitting in the living room writing this out and slowly counting down the hours until we jump on our plane and make our next great migration. Although I suspect that sitting in a plane for 10 hours and travelling four times the distance might be alittle easier on my body. My stupid circulatory system makes my feet puff up something fierce though if I don’t move around so I better make sure I do that. They (my toes) seriously look like little sausages if I don’t. And no I won’t post my feet pics to prove it. So fear not.
Anyway back to the trek. We listened to two lovely audio books by Andrew Hunter Murray (from our favourite podcast No Such Thing As A Fish) which really did help keep our sanity. The first one was called “A beginners guide to breaking and entering”. I won’t pitch it here but its a great listen. It really helped zone me out while I was driving at 130kms an hour and feeling like we were getting nowhere, until suddenly we were stopping to get some surprisingly not that expensive fuel, buying a drink and of course going to the toilet. Then it was back to seeing a whole not of interesting nothing.
At one point I decided we should play a game of Eye Spy which honestly was a bit of great fun and burnt up some extra time. We also saw Camels! Which was so awesome because I knew that Australia has the biggest camel population outside of their native countries. The journey did sort of all blend together. Except I can vividly remember driving for three hours on a dirt road….yes three hours, I am not exaggerating here, to get to a place called Wave Rock. All so I could do a stupid surf pose (worth it!) and keep on driving.
It was worth it. Everything about this drive. The countless hours of passing landscape that ever so slowly changed. Seeing the whales and camels and stopping at little towns in the middle of dingo woop woop (a great way of measuring if I do say so myself). There’s just something about a road trip.
Well thats all for this post. Talk soon xx.
S.
P.s. I edited this and changed all the I’s into capitals because the other half was annoyed that they were all lower case. Something about proper grammar or whatever. Blame my english teachers.
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