Today was our first real experience of long distance (360+ kilometres) on true Aussie dirt roads. From the moment of leaving the strange brand new, yet virtually deserted campsite at Gascoyne Junction we drove on dirt roads for the next six hours. During that time we saw no cars or people, and just a few cattle from the half dozen remote homesteads that we passed by in the distance. Each homestead has its own signposted track and is named on the largest scale maps because there are simply no villages. We wanted to take a slightly shorter route, but when we got to the track we were looking for, it had a Danger unmaintained route sign so we decided to play it a bit safer and go the only other way which was a further 80 kilometres round. As it was the road was full of gullies, corrugations and crossed at least one dry, yet wide and very stony dry river bed.

We're now camped out at a roadhouse called Minilya back on the main coast road. It's a glorified transport cafe with a bit of ground at the back on which they let people camp for the night (for a fee of course) but at least we have electricity, though the water is straight from a borehole.

Today's negatives are:
The car brake fuse blew again fairly early on so there's obviously some short in the system probably caused by the trailer brake system. Bought some more fuses, but that's not a solution. At least there were no cars behind us that needed signalling to.

We totally broke off the bottom of the water pipe system under the trailer which must have been bashed in one of the gullies. Another repair required there and we also lost all our water supply from the trailer as it poured out on to the road.

The back awning has sheared off the fixing rivets and now hangs loose. We can probably find some way of temporarily getting by, but it will annoy if we can't at least find some really small bolts to get a better long term solution.

Finally at least one of the drawers won't open except with a lot of banging and cussing, and then won't close again. We suspect bull-dust in the works.

Is someone trying to tell us that we shouldn't be trying to do this.