28^th of August.

The following morning, I crawled under the car to check if anything was about to break.  Everything looked fine, apart from the rear mud guards.  The corrugations had of course broken one of the attachments that kept them from swinging back and forth.  Thus I proceeded to fix them.  Once done, it was a quiet day, mostly spent reading and relaxing.

We did drive out to the Miners Pool, which is about 5km from the campsite.  It’s a large pool of water in the Drysdale river.  There is a bush camping site along the pool, but it was pretty much empty.  We took our swimmers and went for a swim to chill out as it was another very hot day, although we had some clouds in the sky that occasionally blocked the sun.  Bear in mind, we haven’t seen clouds for next to five weeks!   The miners pool was very cool and nice.  They even had a rope tied to a tree, so one could swing from the bank and drop into the pool.  However, the water was too shallow for that now!

When we got back, it had become quite hot and one of these dust devils occurred in the campground.  It formed not far from the car and then headed towards me as I stood next to the car.  It just breezed past and went towards another camper, while I grabbed the camera to snap a photo.  As I snapped the photo it was just about to dissipate and die away!

Despite our mishap with the spare wheel, we can only be happy that it hasn’t been worse.  Yesterday we saw a fairly new 4wd vehicle on the back of a truck, being driven out of here, onwards to Wyndham we assume.  Also, late last night someone arrived with a large clunking noise, which died down as they drove into the garage area, where they do repairs.  Later this morning we saw the cause.  A camper trailer had been driven in here with one tyre and the other, just the rim or what was left of the rim!  Someone hadn’t had a spare and rather than leave their camper trailer, they drove on the punctured tyre and when they arrived, the rim was the only thing left and not in a circular shape anymore!  Also, tonight another camper trailer arrived.  They set up not far from us and then started their generator.  There is a requirement to shut these things off around 8pm.  The guy came around after 8pm, while the generator was still chugging along and apologized.  He told us the camper trailer had separated from the towing vehicle and torn all the cabling between them to shreds.  Thus they were desperate to get their camper trailer battery charged so the food in the camper trailer fridge wouldn’t go to waste.  He told us a lot of fixing would be required tomorrow, so I can imagine something more is amiss.  This is of course caused by the corrugations, which in places are pretty bad.

The dust devil swirling around near us!

Sibba swimming in the Miners Pool.

The Miners Pool is part of the Drysdale river.

The swinging rope.