Day 9

It was a fairly mild sort of morning, a few clouds about but the sun still shining through. Just after packing the car to go Morgs noticed some Major Mitchell cockatoos coming... perhaps they heard Morgan expressing her disappointment at them not being at the bird sanctuary yesterday?

One of the Majors was flying within 20m of us.  Morgs fumbled with the camera for a second then gave it to me.  I fumbled with it for a few seconds then just as I was about to take a fantastic shot of it the bird tacked behind a tree and was never seen again.

We headed up the track about half a kilometre to check out the ruins of the Burnabbie Homestead.  All that remains is a timber frame, which has some wire netting over the top like a large cage.  The weeds are climbing up the wire and nature is very much reclaiming the land where some poor souls once worked their butts off to make a living.

With no obvious track back up the escarpment the only main option was to back track to the Eyre Bird Observatory track and follow the main road back to the highway.

We stopped off for a quick look at Cocklebiddy Cave - closed to the public due to "recent rock falls" just like most of the other caves.  This cave has a gradual descent down to the cave entrance, which is below the natural surface of the plain, which is again in the middle of a treeless plain.  Given access into the caves is only granted to the special few who have experience/qualifications and probably some professional reason to be down there, there's really no great appeal to these caves for the average tourist other than to see a hole in the ground and imagine what it's like further in the hole.

We were getting eager to replenish our bread, fruit and vegie supplies, so the decision was made to postpone the Bilbunya Dunes detour until the trip home.  We'll be coming back along the Eyre Highway again, so will be driving past the same turnoff; we just need to allow an extra day when heading home.

Stopped in Caiguna to top up the fuel and our supply of Nippy's flavoured milk (Morgs has got me hooked on that stuff).  Heading west, Caiguna is the start of the 90 Mile Straight - the world's longest straight stretch of road in the world - 145.6km!  Now most people are probably not that interested in this and think it's boring, but from and engineering & surveying perspective I think this is damn unique - where else in the world can you build a road from A to B that does not have to deviate for some cocky's milking shed, or some old timer's heritage listed fence, or some greenies endangered ground-dwelling titmouse.  Morgs certainly didn't find it that interesting and dug her eyes deep into a book she was reading on her Kindle.

Since I was driving the longest straight stretch of bitumen in the world and Morgs was being the most boring passenger in the world, it got me thinking about all sorts of wierd things, like whether GT has won that new proposal we submitted just before I left.
The next form of "civilisation" was the Balladonia Roadhouse - the last one heading west before arriving at Norseman; the town at the end of the Nullarbor crossing.  It was worth stopping here for a break because it was over an hour and a half since stopping in Caiguna and Norseman is another 2 hours further down the road.  You know the jingle: break the drive and stay alive. 

There's an interesting little museum at Balladonia, where they have a bunch of articles and artefacts from the time when Skylab came crashing down from they sky.  There were two pieces of Skylab "debris" - one mounted on the roof of the roadhouse and the other in the museum on display.  Morgs applied her knowledge from Air Crash Investigation and the podcast Skeptoid to "cast her skeptical eye" over the debris.  Why have they only used a single row of pop riverts for a spacecraft?   This airlock handle doesn't do anything. This vent doesn't have an opening on the other side.  Why is a range hood grease filter nailed to it??  I also thought it was strange that the paint was still intact instead of being burnt off on re-entry, and what were the chances that there was a single piece that had a parts of a "United States" logo next to an "airlock", and a bunch of other vents.  We later found a website for the roadhouse that said the museum had some "replica Skylab debris".  Nice try though.

Back on the road we continued west for Norseman, hoping to stay somewhere around there.  The road, although still very straight was now changing in altitude a bit and the vegetation on the side of the road had grown from car-sized shrubs to 3-storey high trees.

Norseman was a strange town.  I realised when I was getting flashbacks to our visit at Iron Knob that it was actually Sunday afternoon and the likely hood of finding an open grocery store was about a snowball's chance in hell.  We pulled out the guide book and found a recommended campsite about 20kms out of town on the way out to Esperance, so we thought we'd leg it for there.

One last thing about Norseman... I've identified it as the town that's made out of corrugated iron.  Many buildings and houses are completely externally build out of sheds.  The Cinema Centre was a glorified corrugated iron shed.  The town hall was a corrugated iron shed.  The local mechanic's workshop was a corrug... well I guess that one makes sense.

Our camp was at Site 9 on the Dundas Historic Trail.  There were fire pits there and someone was kind enough to leave a heap of slightly green wood for us to chop and burn.  It was nice to have a fire, for the first time this trip, but we forgot the marshmallows.  Next stop: Esperance and some proper civilisation.