Mentally we had been gearing up for the Nullarbor as one of the more gruelling legs of our round Australia trip. We knew we had to head off armed with the obvious full supplies of food, water, fuel etc., but we also knew that we had to have a few tricks up our sleeve for the journey to help the kilometres pass for the four youngest Smeads. We decided that advent calendars could be helpful with one chockie per half hour being the goal. The calendars were a hit and those half hour marks sure came around quickly for everybody. We’re still trying to work out however how the Christmas Day window was opened and treat eaten by the end of day two of the Nullarbor. Giving Georgie a new pack of tissues to pull apart also worked well for a while, until we pulled up to our stop at Eucla on Day two and in gale force winds the contents of the tissue pack sailed into the dusty outback in every direction! New videos, Mummy folding origami animals for the kids and various other boredom busters made the trek bearable. However what made things much easier was to be travelling in convoy with another family. We were fortunate enough to have the company of our friends Greg, Lisa and little Joe once more. It was great to pull up at a rest stop or at the end of the day and all pitch in to set up, organise dinners etc and to have that time to sit and chat over the evening meal.
Our first nights stop was at a great outback oasis called Fraser Range Sheep Station, about 100 kilometres east of Norseman. We set up and then headed off for a walk around the property across deep dry creek beds and through a maze of prickly bushes and cattle and sheep bones that the kids had great fun examining. Both Harrison and Annabelle wore a cow’s pelvis around their heads at one point! After some time it started to rain and the temperature dropped so we headed back to the refuge of the van only to find that we hadn’t set up the bed flies, so we had a couple of wet beds which was a bit of a pain (with no means of drying them out). Heavy rain for much of the night on the Nullarbor, who would have thought!
The next nights stop was at Eucla on the Great Australian Bight and just shy of the SA border. We set of in bathers to have a dip at the beach, only to find that the walk over the dunes went on and on and without sufficient water supplies we thought it best not to press on late in the afternoon. By nightfall we were in jackets and beanies. What a contrast! Day three we stopped off at The Head of Bight both for breakfast and to look for more whales, but apparently they had moved on only days prior. We did spot a dolphin and the sheer cliffs of the Bight were very impressive. Australia literally drops of into the deep at that point. It was a marvellous sight!
After crossing the border into South Australia we finally arrived in Streaky Bay. A beautiful little town with wheat fields running down to meet the bay. This was a welcome sight after the bareness and relative monotony of the Nullarbor outback. All in all the Nullarbor was actually quite a fun adventure. The kids were great, we shared special time with new friends and the landscape (which was actually more vegetated than we had expected) was beautiful in its own way.
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