I challenge you to pronounce it. Fortunately when you arrive there is a sign on the counter giving you a guide to it’s pronunciation. You also have a manager greeting you with ‘you’re through the worst part of the road’. We were lulled into a false sense of how easy it would be after leaving Giles Breakaway. Sure, there were short patches that were sandy, a bit wet, or with bad corrugations. We have been running into another couple doing the same journey since Laverton and they came into the same rest area after about 150kms. We all agreed that it wasn’t too bad.

But the last 100kms was very corrugated and we ended up travelling on the dry ridge in the middle of the road. It was rough, but nothing like taking the corrugations. Apparently, that part has not yet been repaired from the floods.

So, we arrived feeling a bit shattered and were so relieved to hear we were through the worst of it.

We opted for the roadhouse caravan park for last night as we wanted to do a bit longer drive yesterday, plus needing to top up with water. It has been very comforting, especially as our neighbours, a NZ couple in a large and very comfortable caravan, invited us for a cup of tea after dinner. We enjoyed discussing our lives and children and discovered we had many things in common.

They are very adventurous with their Jayco Silverline and Ford Ranger and think nothing of taking gravel roads on their Australian trips. They keep the caravan and vehicle here in Australia and fly over for about four months in winter each year. He is an experienced off roader in NZ as well as here.

We’ve been recommended a place for bird watching called Fog Dam, which is just out of Darwin. It is another incentive to travel north once we hit the Stuart Highway. And, as the man said, it makes a change from just doing our own thing in our RVs in the evening. I’m so glad they took the initiative.

We will do our filling up of water before we leave here and plan to free camp tonight, somewhere before the next roadhouse. This roadhouse offers water fillups for $10 and we are hoping the next roadhouse will do the same. That means we don’t really need to stay at roadhouses, unless we want to, of course.

We ended up not letting our tyres down yesterday, partly on the advice of our neighbour. With his years of experience, and the fact that his setup is 6 tons, he said he doesn’t really think it helps, it’s just an obsession with the young ones. We don’t travel very fast, sometimes up to 80kms p/h, but mostly 60-70kms, and it really is a faff. He says that he only does it for sand.