Monday, March 05, 2007

Kangaroolette

We're at Balladonia. Where's Balladonia?
The middle of the middle of nowhere!
About 1000km from Perth actually, at a Roadhouse, the first one we;ve found open in the last 4-5.
We left Adelaide at 8.15am Sunday, stopped at Wudinna for a couple of hours and left there at about 5.pm.
It's now 9.15 am WA time and we've been on the road about 26 hours.
Someone warned us that there was 300km of kangaroos from Eucla onwards.
Sure enough, there was 300km of kangaroos from Eucla onwards.
For about 4 hours we played Kangaroolette.
While one drove the other spotted and it was a full time job.
Most of the roos had the brains or the decency to get off the road or stay out of the way but every now and then 1-2 of them would decide to tempt fate and jump straight across the road in front of us.
We were driving pretty slowly so managed to avoid them all although the jury is out on whether Dad has lost his 100% clean record of never having hit a native animal; one little roo scampered across the highway and sharp brakin resulted in the bumper bar just clipping the tipof his tail. Neither roo nor vehicle were harmed but we await the decision on whether this constituted an official "hit".
We were mightily relieved to see the last of them about half way between Caiguna and Balladonia.
We were both pretty tired by then so stopped for a rest and got about three hours sleep in the front seats of the car, not a bad result.
We've stopped for breakfast, then onto Norseman, approx 300km west of here before taking a dirt road from there to Hyden then on home to Busselton.
ETA. 9.pm

2 comments:

Jacqui said...

walter says that we are one up on you, as we played eaglette the day after our kangaroolette, they were feasting on all the road kill from the trucks the night before.

Peter said...

Being the only ones silly enough to continue driving through that area and having the unblemished record of not hitting any there was suprisingly little "roadkill" and definitely no nocturnal wedgetails around.