Day 7

Lake Douglas (Kalgoorlie) - Kalgoorlie - Menzies - Lake Ballard

" I press my face against the glass and watch the white lines rushing past..."

Nice sunrise over the Lake this morning. We drove into Kalgoorlie and restocked our food early to get it out of the way. Had the mandatory drive down Hay street to check out the pink doors and then had a good look at some of the older buildings that Kalgoorlie has preserved . The Town Hall is a magnificent building with pressed tin sculptured ceilings and it's hall complete with a theatre, stage with a curtain dating from 1908 and older style velvet seats in the dress circle - lots of history here and it's still in use as the council chambers.

We drove to the KCGM Superpit Gold mine which is just so overwhelmingly huge. It's currently a 2.6km long hole in the ground and 290 odd Metres deep and will eventually get to 3.5kms long and over 500m deep. They blast pretty much everyday too! Just one of those large dump trucks costs $4M and they have 31 at the site . Each tyre costs $26k. Bond bought up as many of the local licenses back when he was cashed up and that allowed them to dig the massive hole that exists now.

We followed that with a visit to the WA Museum which was another interesting look at early mining and much of Kalgoorlie's history.

Our driving today took us North to Menzies and then onto Lake Ballard. From Menzies it's 52ks on the rusty red dirt which means the caravan is due for a good scrub once we get some water!!

Lake Ballard is a salt lake that an artist Anthony Gormley has used as a setting for 51 sculptures" depicting" various Menzies townfolk. We watched the sunset over the lake and sculptures with a nice half moon providing some beautiful colours over the white of the crusted salt surface to finish the day. Our campsite tonight is right by the lake which we will explore more in the morning to watch the sunrise before breakfast.

Only drove 221 k's today!!

Other than the massive 53.5m road trains that we are now seeing- nothing else of note to report today.