The CrossingNortham to Cunderdin
The Road Got Loud
Leaving the tracks for the Great Eastern Highway changed the feel of everything. The sky opened up, the trucks got loud and my nerves arrived before the flies did.
Day 3 was where the sheltered trail days ran out.
After more than 100 kilometres on the Railway Reserves Heritage Trail and the Kep Track, leaving Northam felt different. The morning was bright. The river looked beautiful. There were still little local jokes and strange connections, like crossing the Avon River past Weston Milling, which amused me because I was born in a town called Weston-super-Mare, which at one point was part of a county called Avon.
Then I reached Great Eastern Highway.
The first two days had been wet, messy, generous, and difficult, but they had also given me the relative safety of trail. The highway was another thing altogether. It was open and exposed. Kalgoorlie was less than 100 parkruns away, which was a funny enough way to make the distance feel measurable, but it also said something useful: I had properly left Perth behind.
The landscape was stunning. Huge skies. Long horizons. The water pipeline snaking across the country like some strange piece of engineering artwork. All I really knew beforehand was that I would be following Great Eastern Highway, but the parallel tracks and the pipeline proved to be very helpful. Sometimes I could follow them. Sometimes the pipeline went bush and sent me back to the highway. It would be beside us for a long stretch of WA, but Day 3 was the first time it really started to feel like part of the story.
There was still plenty of silliness in the day. Ols walked an 11 kilometre section of Great Eastern Highway with me. Ben was on lunch duties. There were Hoka shoes everywhere. The flies arrived in force, and Ben got his first proper taste of WA fly life. There is nothing quite like watching someone discover that Australian flies are not NPCs.
At Meenaar we stopped for lunch with about 26 kilometres done. Meckering was next, then Cunderdin for the night. Somewhere between Meenaar and Meckering, Scott Bunny caught up after driving from Perth with the Tailwind tub that had reached Run West after we’d left. A tub of drink mix looks small in a timeline. Beside the highway, it was somebody finding a way to keep me moving.
By late afternoon Ben and I had reached Meckering. I refuelled there, and then I was solo again for about 10 kilometres. The sky and the landscape were amazing, but the day was starting to tilt. The bright morning had become a longer, more exposed afternoon. The weather was less friendly. The parallel tracks and pipeline were beginning to run into the actual country in front of me. The GPS file was corrupt and wouldn’t upload to Strava, which is why the day now sits there as a manually added 50-kilometre activity rather than a neat route trace.
In the final session I followed the pipeline away from the highway, then realised in the dark that I had likely wandered onto private land and needed to find my way back to the road.
I did get back to the road. That was not the end of the problem.
Once I was on Great Eastern Highway in the dark, with heavy vehicles close by and the weather getting worse again, the whole thing became horrible very quickly. I had spent two days on trails and had tried to stay off-road as much as I could through Day 3. I had not adjusted to being literally on the highway yet. The trucks were loud, close, and overwhelming.
So I called Ben and Ols and asked them to pick me up, probably around 20 kilometres short of Cunderdin. They drove me forward to Cunderdin for the night, with the plan to bring me back to that same point in the morning.
It wasn’t some grand failure. There was bravery in keeping moving, but there also had to be sense. I would get used to road trains and highway walking later.
The day still had 50 kilometres in it. It also had Poppet’s Pantry lamb tagine (apparently I could not stop talking about the food it was so yummy). That feels very true to the first week: massive skies, something going wrong, body and nerves frayed, and then a hot meal becoming the centre of the universe for a few minutes.
The next morning, with my brain mashed enough that I forgot to take a photo, I posted one more small piece of the overnight story: Jim, the owner at Cunderdin Caravan Park, had signed one of the “lock in the love” hearts and wished us well.
Images From The Day
