It has become a strange fact this holiday that the more basic hotel / motels we have been staying in serve really good food. Last night we went round to the bar without much optimism but as it was the only bar in town it was where we had to go, we walked in and basically we were asked what meat we wanted and handed this, Chris had a burger and I had the steak you are then directed to an indoor barbecue and you cook it yourself and if you really want it salad and veg are available! Both our meals were really nice and once we finished we went back to the room to watch an episode of Dr Who that Chris had downloaded off the BBC website then went to bed. It was another really long drive today, although a quick discussion with the locals meant that rather than the 7 hours it should have been we managed to reduce it to five hours! The sealed roads don’t run directly to Kalgoorlie but there is a gravel road that is maintained by the mine companies that cuts across country and basically reduced our drive by a couple of hours. The locals were right the road is well maintained so we made really good time, we are definitely in the heart of the mining country here as the only signs we saw were to either Gold or Tin mines. We are also back in the country of the road trains but we were lucky that we didn’t see them until we were back on the main sealed road, it would have been really difficult following them on the gravel road as the dust we kicked up was bad enough, following a three or four truck road train would have been like driving through fog. Once we got back on the main road we saw a couple of wide loads that actually covered both lanes of the highway which meant we had to virtually pull off the road to let them past. We stopped for lunch and finally arrived in Kalgoorlie about 2.30pm, we stopped at Visitor Information to pick up some maps of the area and work out what we are going to do tomorrow as we are not able to do the tour we had hoped as the mine is doing something but we are still doing a smaller tour so we will need to do something else, unfortunately it is 37 centigrade here and forecast to be the same again tomorrow so too much walking may be a problem. We checked into the hotel and although we had thought we would go for a swim in the end we basically just relaxed in the room until we went round to dinner.
