Today did not go as planned! A week or so ago (before hitting the Karratha region), we booked a sunset Archipelago cruise for this evening out of Dampier for our last night before moving south.

We woke this morning to a fire sky. What’s that saying? Red in the morning, sailor’s warning. Red in the night, sailor’s delight…. Well the red morning happened and it must have been a warning…

The Scott’s exercised early and Bob and I didn’t. It is 65km to Karratha and we had some new knobbly bike tyres ordered from Queensland through the bike shop for me (so I don’t fall off on our sandy road riding) and amazingly they arrived yesterday. We had planned to have a dinner in town tonight after our cruise but with the bike shop closing at 1pm we rejigged the plan and left camp at 11am to pick them up and then have a long lunch before the cruise at 4pm.

The forecast wasn’t amazing for sunset. Cloudy all day and then some possible rain. I was sort of hoping the clouds would make for an amazing sunset just like the sunrise, however that was not to be. We arrived at the boat ramp and received a call from the operator asking whether we really wanted to go out. At this stage it had been raining steadily for 15 mins and didn’t look like stopping for an hour or so, so we all agreed to abandon the cruise and we started our traverse back to camp – which was better for us as we weren’t driving the 10km on the gravel road into camp in the dark.

All was going well until we turned off the highway and were greeted with a road closed sign!

Really not what we were expecting after about 5mm of rain that we had driven through on the way back. And clearly not applicable to us, as our homes-on-wheels were sitting at the other end of the road with everything we need to exist. So Bob took a deep breath and with Kieran (who knows 4wding) and me (who knows wet corrugated roads from living on a property in her teens) giving largely complementary advice for getting back to camp along the road 🙂 .

Clearly there had been significantly more rain here than in Karratha! We made it back to camp, drove around the road closed barricade in front of the camp host site and proceeded to our van. Really glad the car had an unnecessary wash a couple of days ago….

There is more rain forecast for tomorrow, so we are thinking it is unlikely we will escape and head to our booking at Onslow tomorrow night. Not worth stressing about. What will be will be.

In positive news, Karen and I finished the jigsaw puzzle and somehow I have managed to turn it into a 998 piece puzzle for its first outing 🙁 . Hoping there will be some pieces under the bed where it was stored which we may find when we get home.

Anyway, time for some Netflix (early blog when stuck in the van). Tomorrow is a new day.