Exmouth to Meadow 602 km
We started the ride by heading North West to check out the Harold E Holt Very Low Frequency (VLF) antennas. These antennas are very tall (second tallest manmade structures in the Southern Hemisphere) however, due to the minimal variation in height of the 13 masts, they don’t appear to be that tall.
We saw a lighthouse in the distance and rode to check it out. This 15km detour was well worth it. The view from the lighthouse was spectacular. Some humpback whales were making their way North; we have now seen whales on both sides of Australia.
After dragging ourselves away from the North West Cape we traveled south along the Exmouth – Minilya Bridge road. Some of this we’d covered yesterday however it wasn’t long until we were on a section of road we had not yet travelled. We refuelled at Minilya Bridge Roadhouse where 95 octane fuel wasn’t available but 98 octane was. The path to the fuel bowsers (all types) is dirt with lots of potholes so be careful. The line up for the diesel pumps was about 5 cars long. One of the delays at this Roadhouse is the need to provide your drivers licence or passport as collateral before being able to fill up. We did notice the staff hand a drivers licence to the incorrect person so be careful.
We then rode onto Carnarvon, this is yet another town we have added to our ‘must come back to list’.
Getting back on the road we traveled to Meadow which was our stay for the night. Along this stretch the world famous Western Australian wild flowers were becoming more plentiful. It was interesting to see the first wild flowers we saw were yellow, then 10 or so kilometers later white, or green or purple wild flowers were prominent. In some sections the wild flowers could be seen to the right and left hand side of the road and as far as we could see.
Whilst admiring the wild flowers we also spotted many families of goats just wandering amoungst the flowers so we had to watch a bit more carefully for fauna.
Along this entire 602 km stretch we saw only a couple of animals as road kill and none of these were goats. Along this entire 8,500+km journey, we think more than 50% of the road kill we saw was between Canberra and Cooma. There must be plenty of feed away from the road so the animals are not needing to graze close to traffic.
There are two accommodation options at Meadow, the Billabong Roadhouse and the Hotel Motel. We stayed in the Roadhouse however the Hotel Motel accommodation looked about the same. The beds were comfortable, the rooms were clean and neither of us heard traffic during the night. Both places have a restaurant but only the Hotel Motel is licensed.
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