Day 22 - Sunday 27 May 2012

The workers had us up bright and early as they continued unloading equipment to erect new toilets at the rest area.

Baxter rest area - new toilets

Our first stop for the day was the Balladonia Roadhouse, which is just past the western end of the 90 Mile Straight. After filling up with fuel again we had a coffee and a muffin before checking out the Roadhouse Museum. The Roadhouse is named after the local Balladonia Station where the wreckage of Skylab landed in 1979. Several large pieces of wreckage are featured in the museum.

Balladonia Roadhouse

Skylab wreckage at Balladonia

We had originally planned to have a night at the Fraser Range Station, between Balladonia and Norseman, however as we were a little ahead of our planned itinerary we continued on to the next stop at Kalgoorlie.

Are we there yet?

We stopped again for fuel at Norseman before turning north to Kalgoorlie. Being a Sunday Norseman was closed apart from its fuel outlets.

The main street features a bronze statue of the racehorse Norseman, but it was not clear which came first - the horse or the town.

Norseman

It ended up as another big day of 487 kms - so having now done over 1,350 kms in 3 days we will stay in Kalgoorlie for 3 nights and rest up before moving on.

We checked into the Kalgoorlie Discovery Caravan Park for 3 nights, but will have to spend the first night on a narrow drive through site, before moving to a larger site tomorrow. After setting up we headed to the supermarket to restock our fruit and vegetable supplies.

Fuel supplies while expensive on the Nullabor, could have been worse:

Ceduna - 155.9 cents per litre, Nundroo RH - 199.9 cpl, Eucla RH - 189.0 cpl, Madura RH - 179.9 cpl, Caiguna RH - 194.0 cpl, Balladonia RH - 192.0 cpl, and finally Norsman 158.0 cpl.

We have now covered 3,500 kms towing the van, and our average fuel consuption has been 22.4 litres per 100 kms - not helped by pushing into a headwind across the Nullarbor where our fuel consumption got as high as 26.5 l/100kms. We have also covered another 725 kms without the van doing a bit of sightseeing.