Monday 2nd September, 2024

We’ve had a couple of good overnight stops. On Saturday we spent the night at Lake Nallan about 30kms north of Cue. When I planned the stop I didn’t immediately realise that we had been there before, but it seemed very familiar. After setting up the Starlink we confirmed that we spent a night there in June, 2021 in the Adria van. In fact, we had the same campsite on the edge of the lake.

The lake was much fuller last time we were there, but the shrinkage worked in our favour as the wading birds were a bit closer to us when they were on our side of the lake. We saw herons and ducks, but no swans this time.

We had our chilliest night yet, 8C outside and 9C inside. As it was sunny in the morning I just rugged up and didn’t use the heater, knowing the sun would warm us up fairly quickly.

The flies were bad in the afternoon when we arrived, but we have fly nets and could still get outside in the evening to see the birds. Someone disturbed them by walking around the lake, and they flew to the other side. It was tricky to photograph them as I don’t have a long enough lens. But, I still liked some the shots due to reflections of the birds and the evening colours.

We’ve been seeing a lot of wildflowers since leaving Port Hedland, but after Cue we’ve begun seeing everlastings, sometimes large clusters. Just before Mt Magnet is a place called The Granites and we called in there to have our lunch.

We refuelled in Cue and had a coffee in the rather nice American diner style cafe. So, with Mt Magnet we just passed through and went on to our park up. It’s nothing special, just a rest area with a large field where you can camp away from the road. I’m not sure if it is private property, but we can see a fence a long way behind us and there are no livestock around. There were two other campers overnight but we were able to find a spot well away from them.

Of course, as it was Sunday, we spoke with Matt on Facetime. Now that we are in the same time zone he sees us preparing and having our meal, then washing up. He used to just join for the washing up. He seems happy enough to just hang there whilst we chat to him and do what we would normally do.