We drove to Newman, which is a mining town, today after our night at the 24hour free stopover. Some English tourists told Ross about this place near Newman to stay called "Rivergums" They said the manager there was very hospitable. So that is what we did and the tourists who recommended this place were not wrong. The manager who introduced himself as Richard said we had three options, one of which was that he would open up one of the small rooms (donga) and we could plug into the power there as well as have use of the shower and toilet to ourselves and of course this is the option we chose. The other options were to pull up on some vacant land and access power and water or park in the caravan park and use public facilities. We were very happy with our choice. The other great thing was we could attend the mess that night and have our evening meal at $25 a head .The meal was smorgasbord style with sweets, fresh fruit, cordial or juice, very nice indeed.

We left the next day heading towards Port Hedland about 450km away fully intending to stop at another 24hour hour stop before continuing on, but the road (The Greater Northern Highway) was so busy with road trains that I was not all that happy about, that we decided to stop sooner rather than later, but as we drove into many roadside rest areas none of them were set up for stopovers, so we drove on and on and on until we decided to keep going to Port Hedland. So quite a long trip. Read about Port Hedland in our next blog entry.