Day 53! (One of our longest!) Wednesday 30 August
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Grace strikes again!
For another unexplained reason (although it seems it is consistent with moving on) Grace is in one of her moods and we are all paying for it!
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We left our little pool side oasis at Cable Beach and headed to get the required supplies for our road trip to Tom Price. It started before we even hit the road.
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I don't think there's any benefit or need to go into the gorey details but let's just say our day road trip today was bl**dy awful!
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After a few hours and when we finally got some phone reception I tried to book Grace a flight home out of Port Hedland tomorrow. I had the flight details and it was crunch time.
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After an incredibly long day we arrived at Pardoo station...acclaimed "Paradise in the Pilbara". Wishful thinking?!
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Pardoo a 2000 hectare working cattle station home to approx 7,500 head of Santa Gertudis cattle and some Brahman. Originally a sheep station with a flock of 200,000 in the early 1900's. The land area stretches 80 kms approximately along the Indian Ocean coastline with tidal creeks and small islands off the shore.
The famous West Australian rabbit-proof fence was completed in 1907 and ended on Pardoo Station at Cape Keraudren, where a stone wall was built into the sea to stop rabbits coming around the fence.
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Once we found a camp site as far away from others as possible we headed out through the gates, across the paddocks, amongst the cows to find a spot to watch the sunset and see if we could get close to 80 mile beach (Australia's longest costal beach stretch) Pardoo Station guests have vehicle access to more than 16 kilometres of pristine West Australian coastline with Eighty Mile Beach, the longest uninterrupted beach in Western Australia, and one of our forfeited overnight camp spots so we could stay in Broome a little longer.
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After the day we'd had we decided it was best not to push our luck or the van too far along the sandy tracks and we pulled up alongside Pardoo Creek where the mouth of the river almost meets the ocean. We'll see 80 mile beach next time.
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Probably irresponsibly we watched Grace and Olivia happily slosh around up to their knees in sandy grey mud on the apparently shark and croc infested (ok so they had only seen one) river bank while we had a very well deserved G&T as the sun finally put to rest our worst day yet!