We made our
way from the station stay at 80 Mile Beach, to the station stay at Barn Hill.
This meant 9 or 10km of dirt track at each one, and about 5 or 6 gates in
total. Barn Hill is about 100km out of Broome and we have heard soooo much
about it. Numerous travellers have recommended it, and it was our ‘trump card’ in our plans. We had to run up a schedule in order to plan our dates
for Dunc’s mum. She was coming to Broome to
meet up with us for a week, and that meant we had to know WHEN we were to be in
Broome. This would allow us to book accommodation and flights and stuff, but
working out when we were likely to be there was incredibly difficult. Dunc
spent HOURS working out a rough itinerary with maps and Google and Wikicamps
and printed out a wonderful spreadsheet. Do you think we kept to ANY of it? The
first 3 nights were already mixed around and, to be honest, I’m not sure we followed any of it to the letter.
We did ensure that we were roughly on track, and we built in a few empty days
here and there and an entire week at Barn Hill, knowing that they are enormous
and do not need to take bookings. In the end, we ‘spent’ 6 days at Exmouth waiting for our
whale shark swim and ended up only having 2 days at Barn Hill.
Now we know
why so many people recommended it to us. We had a site in the unpowered section
and arrived before midday. Dunc did his usual walk around and picked out a
suitable Bertha-sized spot. To get us into the right spot, he drove in forwards
first then had to reverse Bertha to straighten her up. This resulted in us
almost landing in the laps of our neighbours who were sitting outside their
caravan enjoying a quiet moment when he was half way through the manoeuvre. I
swear, we were about 15cm from their van. “What time’s dinner?!” Dunc cheekily asked out the drivers window, as they were sitting only 1
– 2m from him. Luckily they had a lovely sense of humour too. He reversed to a
suitable distance from their van and all was well. The melting moment cookies I
baked for them helped as well. I like to bribe our neighbours when we intend to
use the generator.
We walked
down the cliff trail to the beach on the first day, and went for a long walk.
That night I was chatting on Facebook when I ‘met’ the family down the way from us.
The children searched out their van the next morning and we had loomband-ing
kids on board soon after that. We ended up all heading to the beach for the
afternoon and the kids had a ball playing with new friends. Just quietly, I had
a ball meeting new friends too. Dunc got to try beach fishing again, with his
usual success. At least he had a beer this time! Barn Hill has a communal BBQ
on Wednesday nights so we all brought our snags along and paid $4 each for a
delicious dessert of Sticky Date Pudding – yum! We didn’t realize it was BYO plates and spoons, so I ran back for our huge stack
of kid’s plates. After the day with my IKEA
beach bag and my stack of IKEA plates, I’m getting a bit of a reputation here. Good thing it wasn’t raining so they didn’t see my IKEA umbrella…
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