THE BIG DASH: On the road again

How good is sunshine?

After a few weeks in busy, noisy and sometimes frigid and wet Perth, we made the decision to backtrack northwards in search of a quieter and hopefully warmer life near the coast.

We found it in a tiny coastal village called Horrocks.

Jane had noticed the signpost to Horrocks as we drove south after leaving Kalbarri a few weeks ago...

Now, the name Horrocks has a bit of resonance for us because of a guy we know called Johnny Horrocks.

Johnny is an Englishman I got to know through mountain biking. Jane is English too, so they got on well.

Johnny was a good rider, but he did have some curious traits. I remember him entering the Gravity 12 Hour at Rosewhite in north-east Victoria – a marathon race long since gone – as a solo.

That is a mighty big effort in itself, but Johnny being Johnny decided to add the extra challenge of drinking a can of beer after every lap.

I think he lasted about three laps before he was zonked out asleep in his tent.

These days Johnny is an ultramarathon runner, so he’s given up the wheels and just pounds along on his feet.

Anyway, very nice bloke.

And Horrocks turned out to be a very nice place, which we’ll get into a bit further along.

We also went looking at some Western Australian wildflowers which, if you know anything about WA in winter, are legendary.

Now, people who know me might be surprised that I would voluntarily go and look at wildflowers, but it was actually very enjoyable.

Back on the job

Tas, our Kia Tasman X-Pro, was limbered back up this week and returned to heavy-duty transport duties.

It was about a 450km drive from where we had been staying in Perth to Horrocks. Then there was a 100km run inland to Mullewa, which promotes itself as a wildflower centre.

Then we hooked up again for the roughly 450km journey back to Perth.

So Tas worked pretty hard this week and, as you can see from the fuel figures below, it showed.

The Brand Highway north of Perth is a hard drive, lots of punchy hills that necessitated fifth and even fourth gear to maintain a decent rate of progress above 85km/h and within coo-ee of our 95km/h target speed.

In the hardest stint, Tas’ 80-litre tank was drained in just under 400km! So you can do the maths for that (it’s 20.5L/100km).

Tas has always been a more enjoyable drive when he’s not towing, which is hardly surprising – what vehicle isn’t?

But ascending the Moresby Range out of Geraldton towards Mullewa, I was surprised by how much the eight-speed automatic transmission was dancing around trying to keep us near the 110km/h speed limit.

I tend to drive Tas manually when we’re towing, so I haven’t paid much attention lately to how the gearbox behaves when left to do its own thing.

And it was certainly busier than a one-armed fiddle player hanging wallpaper.

Once the roads settled down and flattened out, Tas returned to being his normal refined cruising self.

The negative this week was our second rock strike of the trip. It happened when we were coming back from Mullewa courtesy of one of the passing road trains.

This one might require a replacement windscreen.

At the moment there’s a four or five-centimetre C-shaped crack right in front of my face. We’ll have to get it inspected when we’re back in Perth to find out whether it can be repaired or not.

So to this week’s fuel numbers:

Litres consumed: 219.31
KM travelled: 1287
Consumption average: 17.04L/100km
$ paid: $525.26 (best price paid: $2.373 per litre)
KM per $: 2.451km (was 4.01km per $ last time)

If you’re driving to Horrocks, it’s intentional. You’re not passing through on your way somewhere else. It’s well off the main road – in fact, it’s on a side road off a side road.

What you find when you get there is a village nestled on a narrow coastal escarpment at the base of a pretty sheer rock wall.

At its centre is a bunch of old fibro fishing shacks. Around them and on the hill above are some rather imposing-looking homes belonging, presumably, to local fishing kingpins and retirees.

And only a few seconds’ walk from the beach is the caravan park.

We jagged a spot with a view down to the water from our front door.

In fact, Jane walked outside one morning and spotted a whale thrashing and cavorting in the bay just a few hundred metres away. The proof is at our instagram page, travelsbytasman.

To be honest, spotting whales here is pretty commonplace, especially for Jane because she’s really good at it.

There were ospreys, too. A series of poles has been erected along the foreshore and the birds have built their nests on top of them. They come and go, feeding their chicks, impervious to our distant attention.

The beach runs for about two kilometres with a headland at each end. It’s cathartic to sit up there and scan the ocean for blows, breaches and the occasional slapping tail.

The bay itself is beautiful and calm, protected by the reef of the Coral Coast. Beyond it stretches the Indian Ocean where the whales are travelling.

There’s not much in Horrocks, not even a pub. Besides the beach walks, the general store serves great fish and chips and the sunsets are brilliant.

Just down the coast at Bowes River huge rollers smash into the shore. The views are epic. Head north towards Port Gregory and there’s the famous Pink Lake. Why is it pink? Good question. But we can guarantee it’s definitely pink.

Importantly, the weather was terrific during our stay, topping out at a very pleasant 22 or 23 degrees. The sky was clear, the water was turquoise and the wind was calm.

Four days here was just bliss.

After a few days at Horrocks we moved down to Geraldton for a couple of nights. Day one was shopping and dealing with odd jobs. Day two was our drive inland to Mullewa to see the wildflowers.

Jane wanted to go. I was happy enough to tag along, but it didn’t really mean anything to me.

Then we went for a walk on what looked like a pretty typical Australian bushland hillside and suddenly found ourselves in a sea of wildflowers. Yellow, white, pink, blue, purple.

It was a fairyland. So I guess the message for the blokes out there is this: if your wife suggests going to look at the wildflowers and you’re not convinced, give it a crack.

I’d talked to Jane about the vastness of the WA wheatbelt previously, but the drive to Mullewa was her first chance to really experience it.

It’s quite something to crest a hill and look east into a vast farmland, young green wheat starting to appear, vibrant fields of yellow canola. And way off in the distance the road we’d be climbing in about 20 minutes.

On the other side of that hill? More vastness.

Truck off

We’ve already talked about UHF radio communications, the language, the etiquette and the sometimes complicated relationship between caravanners and other road users.

Coming south from Geraldton towards Perth, we got a pretty disturbing insight into the dark side.

It wasn’t directed at us, but it was pretty brutal.

Two truckies somewhere behind us on the Brand Highway – we couldn’t see them, but we could certainly hear them on the radio – were having a pretty big bitch about a caravan.

The C-word and F-word were flying around and eventually one of them suggested they should simply run these f------- caravanners off the road.

The other bloke agreed. “f------ c----“.

It wasn’t an easy listen and I hope it’s not an opinion shared by most of the truck drivers we encounter.

Certainly we’ve been treated very professionally and courteously by the truck drivers we’ve dealt with.

The problem for these truckies is caravans aren’t going away. I reckon combinations account for 60 per cent of the traffic on these highways north of Perth.

The next most common traffic is the heavy transport servicing the mines, towns and communities along the coast.

So we really need to find a way to cooperate rather than fight each other.

A dog’s life

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about our Dachshunds Eddie and Lulu in any detail and how they’re coping with this trip.

For the vast bulk of it they’ve been excellent travel companions.

Lulu, in particular, loves the car. It’s her safe space. If we’re hanging around camp and it looks like we’re packing up, she just wants to get into Tas.

She’ll sit in her bed in the back or jump into the front passenger seat and simply watch as we go about our business.

Until recently Eddie has been pretty good too.

But we were driving out of Perth last Sunday morning on the freeway when suddenly I felt wet slobber on my ear.

Eddie was climbing out of his bed behind me, half straddling the edge of it and the back of my seat, trying to get around so he could sit on my shoulder like a parrot.

It was pretty unexpected and obviously not the safest thing to be happening at freeway speeds, so we pulled over as soon as we could and secured him a bit more firmly.

We’re still not entirely sure what’s going on.

We’ve heard a couple of yelps lately without really seeing what caused them and suspect Lulu may have given him a nip. Maybe he’s trying to get away.

Eddie’s old, he’s 13, pretty blind and pretty deaf.

He’s still quite fit – he’ll happily trot along the beach – but maybe his Mr Magoo-style wandering occasionally irritates Lulu?

While Eddie is usually pretty relaxed, Lulu can be pretty anxious.

She was attacked a couple of times when she was younger and that’s translated into her being very wary of other dogs.

She’ll often bark at another dog even if it’s still quite a distance away. On other occasions she’ll walk straight past without worrying about it.

So I guess what we’re still figuring out is how best to manage that.

We’ve been working on it throughout the trip without a lot of success and we know that when we get back to Melbourne she’s going to need some more training and perhaps some professional help.

So, overall, are we glad we brought them? I think the answer has to be yes.

We’ve been away long enough that we would have missed them terribly if we’d left them behind.

Yes, they’ve placed some restrictions on where we’ve been able to go and what we’ve been able to do, but we’ve also learned a lot about travelling with dogs – things like dog sitting and how to manage the places they can’t go – and that’s useful knowledge for the future.

So, now we’re headed back to Perth for a few more days to sort a few things out.

Then we’ll start the cruise south; Busselton, Margaret River, Albany and eventually to the place where I learned to swim, a place called Bremer Bay. It’s another one of these tiny coastal villages like Horrocks WA seems to specialise in.