Day 135 05/08/2011 Norseman – Caiguna

Day 135 05/08/2011 Norseman – Caiguna

Bbrr it was very fresh this morning!! That was a great sign because the sky was clear and we enjoyed a gorgeous winter’s morning.

Hardy Norseman

We stopped for morning tea at Norseman, this is a very small country town but the kids found a park and managed to let some of their pent up energy out!!  Norseman is a historic gold mining town and is the gateway to the Nullarbor, we were excited because it meant we had started the pilgrimage home!! Norseman is also known for its tin camels and “Hardy Norseman”.  Hardy Norseman was a prospector’s horse who was tethered overnight in Norseman in the late 1800’s.  According to the story the horse pawed the ground all night and dug up a piece of gold bearing quartz!! And this caused a gold rush and since his discovery over 5 million ounces of gold has been taken out of Norseman.



Tin Camels



The tin camels in the main street are a memorial to the camels that supported the gold rush in the early 1900’s.

Once we left Norseman Pete gave me the bad news that with the bush fix to the caravan spring there was no way that the caravan of peace, love and happiness would pass registration in any state!!  This meant that we went from having five – six weeks to get home to 17 days.  All of a sudden we need to be home by the 22^nd August 2011, the day the registration runs out on the caravan.  In reality this means we will be home three weeks earlier than planned, not so bad really, but we are all a little disappointed with this latest development.

Given, the significant change in plans we now needed to make a little bit of a nudge into the kilometres that were still ahead of us, so that we could get home on time, before rego runs out!!  So without any ado we started the trek across the bottom of Australia.  We settled for the night at a road side stop just outside of Caiguna.  Caiguna has the distinction of being either the beginning or at the end of Australia’s longest straightest stretch of road, 146.6km’s of straight road, not a bend or curve to been seen.  Luckily we were able to look at woodland, shrub land and then a savannah plain.

Just as we were pulling into our night time stop we were privileged to see two huge wedge tail eagles feasting on a dead kangaroo.  These birds of prey were so huge!!.  We were not able to get a photo but it was awesome to see two of them in the wild and so close.