Port Hedland and Karratha

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Heading south down the west coast of Western Australia

We have another couple of nights at Barn Hill Station before we head further down the coast. We have booked our flights home. We leave Perth at 10.30am on 20^th September and get into Sydney at 4.30pm and we leave Sydney again at 8am on 4^th October and arrive in Perth at 10.15am. Although the holiday is great, I do miss everyone at home. I especially miss the Sunday afternoon get togethers at Mum and Dads. So I am looking forward to the 2 weeks at home.

I was thinking of Meagan today and how hung over she probably is as she is 21 today and had a bit of a party on a boat last night. I am sure she had a great time

We took some great sunset photos at Barn Hill as it was our last night there and tomorrow we are heading to Eighty Mile Beach.

On the way to Eighty Mile Beach there were masses of wildflowers blooming at the side of the road. Western Australia has the most amazing and unique wildflowers. There is a huge tourist business based around following the wildflowers down the coast as they bloom.

As we were travelling along the road we came up behind a caravan which looked like a modern version of a gypsy caravan. As we passed it, as it was only doing about 30kph, we discovered it was being towed by a fancy blue tractor. Quite amazing.

When we arrived a Eighty Mile Beach, we came over the crest of a hill and spread out in front of us was the amazing green of the Indian Ocean.

The beach actually does stretch for 80 miles and the tide goes out a very long way.

The beach is covered with thousand of shells at low tide and people collect them to make wind chimes and other items from them. Naturally I did the same and I now have an amazing collection of shells to bring home. I have scallop shells which are coloured pink, orange, gold, green, white, grey and black. I also have a collection of large white conch shells.

There are a lot of people in the caravan park from Perth. They come up here for 3 months to get away from the cool weather down south. The fishing up here is very good and at high tide the beach is packed with everyone lined up with their fishing lines in the water. They catch reef sharks, thread fin salmon and mulloway.

Ray went for a walk along the beach on Friday afternoon and when he came back he said he had bumped into some people and invited them for a drink. It turned out to be our friends Helen and Bob, who we had last seen in Derby. So we caught up with each others news again.

On Saturday we headed off again and were headed to Pardoo Station. The last night at Eighty Mile Beach blew like crazy so were glad to be packing up and hopefully heading to somewhere less windy. Pardoo Station is a working cattle station with about 8000 head of Santa Gertrudis cross cattle which they breed for the live export trade out of Broome. Things are a bit quiet in that area at the moment. But they have a small caravan park which is very nice. You have access to a creek and also the beaches and a lot of fishing goes on. There seem to be a lot of people come for the week end. I assume they would come up here from Port Hedland which is only about 120km south.

On Saturday lunch time the station hosted lunch for about 30 cars which were taking part in the variety bash of WA. They raise money for charity and the cars were heading north and were due to finish their bash next Saturday in Kununurra. The cars are all pre 1982 models and the drivers and crew are all in fancy dress to match their vehicles, eg. The Flintstones, ACDC, Buzz Lightyear and Hippies, to name a few.

We went for a drive out to the beach and came across a brown snake crossing the road. We were very careful not to run him over.

We are leaving here tomorrow to head to Port Hedland as we need to find someone who can have a look at our water heater.

We have now arrived at South Hedland and Ray has done some temporary repairs to the hot water system which will do us until we can find someone to fix it. South Hedland and Port Hedland are not orientated towards tourists. There is too much mine work around. We are staying here for a couple of nights and will have a look around tomorrow.

We bumped into Tony and Chris again. They are staying at this caravan park tonight also.