Perth - Peterborough - Day 1

Success! It's taken us 4 years of trip departures to finally manage to execute a hassle-free (and on time) trip departure. Everything was running smoothly (including OziExplorer) for about 40minutes until we stopped for fuel (and the first of many on-the-road nappy checks) at Midland. On restarting the engine the GPS unit (a 2 yr old Magellan Meridian) would not fire up. Technical glitches such as this are high-priority to the "business" side of our "holiday" and all occupants of the vehicle must wait patiently for the IT guru (he may be sticker-god to some, but he is IT-god to most) to find a resolution. After excessive waiting for acquisition of satellites, and even re-initialising of the unit it appeared the GPS had decided not to be a part of the ExplorOz Team field trip No. 4. With some expressive language, it was agreed that we must drive on. For about 100km we crawled along the road hoping to get the GPS to acquire enough satellites to get a fix, but it simply would not. This meant we did not record our plot file for this sector.

Miraculously, the GPS unit warmed up after 100km and by 5.45pm we had put in a decent day's travel of approximately 400km on the tar. We stopped about 120km west of Coolgardie on the western boundary of Boorabbin National Park at a good roadside p-bay with tracks out the back to good bush camps.

The "30 second" OzTent went up in just that - 30 seconds, forming an instant playground for Chardae who was experimenting with the transition from sitting to crawling and Leah was ecstatic to learn that the tent doubled as her art room where she could draw and colour-in without getting dust all over her work.

I will remember this camp as it was full of ants, centipedes and many other strange and wonderful bugs I've not seen before and for being the place where our problem list rapidly expanded.

Problem No 2:- we had used the Cobb at home before we left and put the grill plate in the dishwasher... where it remained, out of sight and forgotten. Luckily we had the Cobb frypan so although it was a slower way to roast our chicken kievs, we managed.
Problem No 3:- on using the video camera I noticed that the view finder didn't work and had to resort to using the LCD screen only.
Problem No 4:- when packing we found we had 2 bristle brushes, so David put one away, and so did I it appeared, leaving us with none to sweep out the tent floor etc.
No moon, lots of stars, bed at 10.30pm.