Day 87 18/06/2011 Tom Price – House Creek Bridge (24hr rest area)

Day 87 18/06/2011 Tom Price – House Creek Bridge (24hr rest area)

For some unknown reason both Pete and I were awake very early this morning!! Not much to do in a caravan park at 5am!! The kids were all up and awake by 6:30am so we were able to get ourselves organised and out of the caravan park by 8:30am. We had a busy day ahead of us as we wanted to go on the Rio Tinto Iron Ore mine tour at 10am, Callum had woken up with an ear ache and there were still groceries to be purchased. 



The giant Tonka truck!!



We headed into town with Pete taking Callum to the GP in the hope of getting an appointment and I headed off to Coles.  Callum has had a sore ear on and off for the past few weeks, I have been able to treat it with ear drops that we used for Zac but as we are heading to the coast I wanted his ears healthy!! Amazingly Callum got to see a GP straight away and we have another prescription of ear drops!!  With the groceries purchased and packed away in the van we headed to the information centre to book into the mine tour grab our safety hats and safety glasses.



The kids with the big digger!!



The mine tour was very informative and illuminating in regards to how iron ore is mined, I certainly had no idea.  The kids were fascinated with the giant trucks and diggers around the mine and could not get over just how big they were.  It was good to see the kids so engrossed in the information provided by the tour bus driver.

After the mine we were heading to Paraburdoo for lunch but needed to get petrol before leaving Tom Price.  We knew that there should be petrol as there had been a delivery yesterday but what we didn’t know was that the computers had gone down, so whilst there was petrol in the tanks we couldn’t access it!! Luckily we had petrol in the jerry cans so we didn’t need to hang around until the computer problem was resolved which was predicted to take up to 24 hours. There was only one service station in Tom Price so we had no option but to fill the tank from the jerry cans and head to Paraburdoo.

After Pete filled the car and jerry cans at Paraburdoo service station, as he was chatting to the lady serving him and explaining the difficulties that we had encountered in Tom Price she said to him “lucky you filled up now as we are about to run out of petrol too!!” and she had no idea when their next delivery would be!!


The open cut mine



Absollutely everything was covered in a thick layer of red
dust.....including us!!


















It has been a funny experience travelling as most of our contact with other people has been with grey nomads or older couples on long service leave, whilst we have met other families they have been in the minority.  When meeting up with other families the conversation usually covers areas such as schooling, travelling with kids, caravan park costs as kids are extra’s and of course tips on free places to take kids!! But at Tom Price we met a family that had been on the road for 3 years and had 8 children, 2 of the 8 kids had been born since they started travelling!! There was absolutely nothing I could say to the mum, I just looked at her in awe, the thought of travelling with 8 children (between 18 months and 11yrs) was enough to send me scurrying for a bottle of chardy at 10am!!  Not to mention having two babies whilst they have been travelling – what was she thinking???

The drive between Tom Price and the rest stop for the night was rather boring, in fact one of the highlights was trying to work out why sometimes the fence had four strands of fencing and other times a single strand??  I mean did they keep different cattle in the four strand and the one strand paddocks?? I know boring, it is times like this I wish I could read in the car and with Pete’s neck better there was no chance for me to get behind the steering wheel!! As the kids sometimes tell us “mum out the window, trees and rocks, and lots of red dirt, it never changes!!”