Saturday 11th May 2013 – Anne Beadell Highway

Sunrise

It rained a little during the night and again while we were having breakfast.  Made it a little interesting packing up.  Jill actually set off for a walk and we picked her up a little down the track. 

This morning we are driving through some very pretty sand hill country.  It continued to sprinkle on and off all morning (a few puddles on the track even) which actually helped settle the sand and made running a little easier.

Phil and Kaye are in the lead today and have 3 camels running along the track in front of them.  They pulled over and we had turns of getting a closer look.  Quite a variety of vegetation through here including kurrajongs which have quite a different leaf to our east coast variety.

Lots of whoop-de-doos, washouts and corrugations.  Some of it quite fun driving.  More interesting trees – grass leaved hakea, cypress pine and a eucalyptus variety which we labelled Eucalyptus Annie beadellis.  Lots of small silver gums (maybe a ghost gum) – certainly not our vision of what a desert is like.

It doesn't look like a desert!

We lingered over lunch today.  The rain has brought the temperature down (17 degrees) and there are no flies!!

After lunch we arrived at Serpentine Lakes – an extensive dry lake system which we actually drove across before crossing the Western Australia Border.  We took group photos at the Len Beadell sign.  We are now in the Spinifex Aboriginal Region.  Our campsite just west of the border had a toilet and a rain water tank – We’re pretty impressed if the is typical of Western Australia rest areas.

Lake Serpentine

South Australia/Western Australia Border

Another fabulous dinner – tuna mornay, bacon carbonara pasta and devilled sausages.  We travelled 150 kilometres today.  Still fairly slow but a lovely drive compared with yesterday.