Our first day on the road

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Balladonia

(963kms)

Well this could be our last time that we are all nice and showered and smelling good, as we set off on our trip over to Toronto to visit my mum for her 90th birthday. Yes the car or should I say Jackos Four by four is fulled packed and ready for a long drive, sometime tonight we should be in the bush somewhere...

Our first pub! But it was closed (probably a good thing, all things considered), was at the township of Cunderdin and don't you just love the clear sky. As the trip goes into NSW you'll understand why I loved our clear sky's, but those clear sky's also brought with it the heat which today was a ripper 29 degrees.

The next stop for a photo was at Kalgoorlie and of-cause if your driving through Kal you have to stop and say G'day to old Paddy, which is a sculpture of Paddy Hannan who was was a gold prospector whose lucrative discovery on 14 June 1893 set off a major gold rush in the area now known as Kalgoorlie.

The other thing worth seeing is a bloody big hole in the ground which is known as the 'Super Pit', it is one of the largest open-cut mines on Earth and the biggest gold mine in Australia. About 900,000 ounces of gold are harvested here each year, making a total of 50 million ounces since it started operating in 1989. The hole is approximately 3.7 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and around 480 metres deep - big enough to bury Uluru.

On the drive down towards the start of the Nullarbor we get stopped at a train crossing, and they have ripper long trains out here I think it took about eight minutes before we are off again.

And before you could say 'Time to check the car tyres' we were traveling along the Nullarbor towards our first nights sleep at Balladonia roadhouse.

Well after a full days driving we drove into Balladonia Roadhouse just after sundown, which made it a bastard getting the tents up. But then we were told that there was limited food supplies which ment no bloody dinner! I had an image from last trip of sinking my pearly whites into a ripper home cooked works hamburger, topped with chips and gravy on the side but sadly we had to eat the last of our egg and bloody lettuce sangers. Not the dinner of champions that I had imagined all day but still it could of been worse, like setting up a tent in the middle of a dark night and having shitty tyres on your car.