Jan. 27: Broome to Karratha

We started off the morning - our last in Broome - by going to The Zookeeper's Store for breakfast. Then we headed to Gantheaum Point, a spot where we could find more confirmed dinosaur tracks. We climbed around the rocks looking for more tracks. G found one early on and I found another, but the location was slippery. We had been warned it wasn't the best place to go with kids, so we didn't get to find the mother load of real-life, confirmed dinosaur tracks. Nevermind, thought, because the beach was spectacular.

We then stopped at the Good Cartel one more time on our way out of town. We had anticipated driving to a spot called Boondari, about 5 hours away. We hit the road around noon. Knowing there were only a few gas spots between Broome and Boondari, we stopped at the first one we found (a few hours into the trip). There, we found some popsicles and a peacock! We also found the pothos plant, one that many households in Portland will recognize as an indoor plant. At the random gas station / rest top we found, pothos was just growing like a weed. Beautiful!

We got to Boondari and decided to keep going. It was only another 2.5 hours to Karratha and the "town" of Boondari was a really rough and tumble mining spot. We decided it wasn't the spot we wanted to stop at so we called the Karratha hotel to see if they could accommodate us. They could so we headed on. The light started to go around 6:45pm and by 7 it was dark. G drove the whole way - 851 km / 528 mi - and was tiiiiired by the time we pulled into Karratha. Karratha is a town that grew around a mining industry in the 60s and then again in the 80s. Now it has boomed around liquified natural gas. It was very different than Boondari. It was a bit depressing to see a part of the world where humans have mined the earth for decades. And we read about the First Nation people who used to live in the area and are now extinct. It was a stark reminder of the destructive history that comes with white people.