This could turn into two blogs, it's been ages since I last wrote.

We are now in Wyndham, but my last blog was written at Eighty Mile Beach where we had a lovely couple of days combing the beach and enjoying some warm weather. While walking along the back of the beach we found two nests belonging to Australian Pied Oyster Catchers, both had two eggs in them. The people at the caravan park had marked the nests with sticks and flags, hopefully well enough to alert the drivers that for some unknown reason would choose to drive in the soft dry sand at the back of the beach.

After a couple of days at Eighty Mile we only moved a few hundred kilometres up the coast to Barn Hill. People had told us that Barn Hill was so much better than Eighty Mile, so we thought we would check it out.

Again, it was very busy, with people and caravans everywhere when we arrived. There were lovely camps in under a lovely grove of trees, but they wouldn't be any good for someone that wanted sun for solar power (like us). When we checked in we found all the sites in under the trees were powered sites, the unpowered were out in the open. Great for solar, but not very nice. Rough ground with an unfinished ablution block, no water on tap. We had a 100m walk to the ablutions and water. We were saving $4 a night over Eighty Mile, but in our minds it didn't have a patch on Eighty Mile. The beach was also quite a walk away from us, though it was probably a more interesting beach because it had rocky reefs that were exposed when the tide was out.

We did end up staying two days and we met two couples we knew there, and Michael helped a couple of ladies with the battery system on their caravan.

When we moved on we headed to Broome, only for fuel and supplies though. Broome last year was too busy for us and this year was way worse.

So from Broome we headed to Willare where there is a roadhouse with caravan park. It's just over the Fitzroy River, not far from Derby. We would have 'free' camped, but we were finding that any spot that could be used, was already in use, also most are very close to the road, which Julie and I don't like too much.

Willare was nice, though it didn't get quite until the bar closed and the locals went home, then it was lovely, until 'locals' of another kind came around. We think someone left a gate open, because around midnight cows had come into the camping area to eat the grass, and for reasons only known to the cows, they had to moo to each other!

We were heading to the Bungle Bungles, a place we had visited in 2020, but it was so hot and dry, we thought we would visit again when it was wetter and cooler. We were booked to be there in two days time, so we had planned to stop at a 24 hour rest area between Fitzroy Crossing and Halls Creek. We had stopped at Mary Pool in 2020 and found it a lovely, though a little busy place. Well, this year we arrived around 3pm and the place was packed! People had set up camp on the approach road, it was that full.

So on we drove to find a spot off the Tanami Road, closer to Halls Creek, we had it to ourselves and it was lovely.

The next day we went through Halls Creek where we joined to cues for fuel before continuing on to the Bungles.

The drive into the Bungles was a lot like last year, only there were rivers to ford, which was a lovely change. Earlier we had gone online to book a site, hopefully in the same campground as we had last year, it was fully booked. So we had had to book into the campground to the north. We were very pleased when we arrived at the campground to find it was only about half full and people had used their initiative to space out from one another.

After setting up we took a quick walk around a walk trail that went up a hill next to the campground were we could take in the views of the range.

I think I will leave this here and continue the story in the next blog.