Head East young man. Next stop Newman.

7/8/16

Our last look at Tom Price

as we rode out of town.

Today we start our three day 1,500 kilometer run home. Newman today, Mount Magnet tomorrow, and good old Perth on Tuesday. It's a huge transport section with very little to see along the way. If there were more daylight hours we could nail this run in two days, but it's just not worth the risk of meeting up with the local wildlife at dawn or dusk.


We made an early start today with a short 277 kilometers leg to cover to get us to Newman, another mining town and just a stop on the trip home.

The further east we went,

the less the scenery looked like this.

We rode past the turn off to Karijini, and I really wanted to go back in and have another look. Maybe I could convince Andrew to do the run down the dirt road.

After an easy ride we reached Newman and found our hotel. Now this was a huge surprise. The Season's Hotel in Newman is really, really nice. The reception area is so up market that I fell in love. I want to live here. Or maybe it's just so different to what we've "enjoyed" along the way that it has distorted my views.

We were really early so our room wasn't ready. No problem, we were a little peckish and decided that the dinning room looked like a pretty good place to have lunch. I must admit we did look a little out of place in the flash dining room wearing all our motorcycle gear. Delores from Argentina, who I mistakenly thought was Spanish, looked after us and lunch was outstanding. The decision about where to have dinner was well and truly taken care of. Here!

On our way out after lunch we asked at reception if our room was ready. Now poor old Richard, the manager, had just had a big weekend and was a bit tense. He thought we "expected" our room to be ready, but the truth is we just go there early and dropped in to see if it was. Once we got past that Richard was a lot of fun and very helpful. Thanks mate.

Right, off to the visitor's centre.

This whole visitor's centre thing is new to me, but it's a bloody good idea. You have an opportunity to chat with a local who knows the area and can suggest thing for you to go and see based on what you're interested in. Why didn't I know about this sooner?

This is where we met Julie. Julie was genuinely nice and chatted to us for ages. She made suggestions for us, phoned ahead to Mount Magnet to arrange accommodation, and did the big sales pitch to sell us a couple of Drumsticks (ice creams). We wanted vanilla, but think Julie may have eaten them all herself, so we had top settle on mint flavoured. The things we suffer for our love of motorcycling.

Now reading this blog you may have realised that I'm a bit of a dog lover. My friends in Wales, Ann Marie and Leigh call Suzanne and I "Dog Botherers" and I'm happy to be know by that title. I reckon that dogs are better people than most people. Dog lovers are also some of my favourite people. It turns out that Julie owns a Pomeraniun and a Daschund. I knew she was a nice person. Thanks for your help Julie.

It was time to do some sight seeing in Newman.

This is one of the smaller Haulpaks that is used to haul iron ore.

It's a little bigger than the Guzzi.

Radio Hill lookout was our spot to view Newman at it's best. Here it is:

The road to Radio Hill.
Who'd have thought you'd find a road like this in Tom Price?

The reason Tom Price exists.

One of the many iron ore mines.

One of our native birds in Australia is the Corella. It's a white cockatoo and known as a bit of a larrikin as it will get into anything an make a mess.

This is what a Corella is supposed to look like:

These are Pilbarra Corellas:

The fine red dust permeates everything up here, even the cockatoos.

That was about it for our tour of Newman and after a call form Richard to tell us our room was ready, it was back to the hotel. I headed for reception, a bit of banter with Richard, a few beers, and to work on the blog. Andrew had a little siesta.

Pretty soon were were back in the dining room and steaks were the order of the day for dinner, and they were deeeeeeliiiiiiiscious.

Tomorrow we have a fairly big day. We'll make an early start and knock off the six hundred plus kilometers to Mount Magnet before our final run home.