Judy & Brian Tour Oz

Bit of catching up to do now that we have our electronical umbilical cord reconnected. Drove out across the Kimberly toward Halls Creek and Purnululu NP. Four Hundred kilometres in five hours, stopping for a cup of tea and break at Mary Pool, 100km west of Halls Creek. Mary Pool is a free camp, a few km off the road on the banks of the Mary River. We had heard on our way across that it was full the night we passed by – a 100 vans jammed in and two toilets. We were interested to see what the fuss was about, apart from being free, being 200km from Fitzroy Crossing and not being in Halls Creek. It’s quite a good spot actually, early birds get a spot on the banks of the dry river bed, the rest get a tree if they’re lucky and a bare patch of ground if not. There were 30 odd vans there already at 11am and more coming in all the time. Some looked like they had been there a while, others, like us, came in for a cuppa and then shot through. The road works we had encountered on our way ...

Hell's bells - now there are only 10 weeks to go, time to get serious about some of these things i guess! What we have done: Changed the dog'n bones to Telstra to get the better coverage 'out there', not to mention a rate pre-paid 15% of whet we were getting from our provider of 19 years. Too bad for them, eh? Put a complete new set of top-of-the-line Michelins on the X5 - ouch that hurts Had the X5 fully serviced including the chassis and the towbar Booked Coober Pedy Finished the CD's - then culled the 3300 tracks down to 1200 Bought a used ipod from ebay and loaded the music to it - 1200 songs, some of which are later than 1969 Don't really know what else to do in the way of preparation for the car and van - we've used it extensively for 2 years and feel comfortable with their performance and reliability - maybe we'll just take off and see how it all hangs together. Sometimes we are keen and excited to be going, other times we are just ...