The Crossing Merredin toward Bodallin
Rabbit-Proof Fence And A Leaking Van
Day 7 saw a return to the road after Merredin with Rabbit-Proof Fence, Burracoppin, Hoka shoe systems, a leaking campervan, split GPS sessions, and 48.9 more kilometres east.
Day 7 was supposed to be a big straight push after the Merredin rest.
The plan was 60 kilometres toward Bodallin. The actual day had other ideas, and so did the campervan.
After the first session, or at least around that first stop-and-reset period, the boys found oil leaking from the van. My memory is of a servo that felt like the middle of nowhere: a cuppa, maybe something to eat inside, no mobile reception, and a pay phone outside. I called the hire company and calmly tried to explain that this was not a normal holiday problem. We had timing pressure. I was walking across the country. A replacement vehicle turning up whenever it suited them was not going to work.
It was a challenge to be faced, dealt with, and not allowed to slow us down. So I had to do the only useful thing I could do: leave it in the hands of Ben, Ols, and fate, then keep walking.
When the boys later overtook me beeping after cobbling together a temporary fix, it felt less like a surprise than confirmation. That was what kept us going: face the problem, assume a solution would present itself, and keep the crossing moving.
That became one of HAA’s repeated lessons. Some problems were mine because they were in my body: feet, fatigue, blisters, heat, traffic, fear. Other problems belonged to the team. The vehicle was one of those. I cared about it a lot, but I could not stand still all day while it was sorted.
The day still gave us some beautiful anchors. Burracoppin with its iconic little Wheatbelt oddness. A stunning spot near Walgoolan. The pipeline crossing over the railway, which I loved because the pipeline had already become part engineering marvel, part navigation companion, part visual thread through the country. Red dirt under the Hokas. The boys had turned the shoe rotation into a system: two matching pairs marked 1 and 3 on the tongues, plus the blue pair that became Blue 2. It spread the wear across all three pairs, and there was a small but real psychological lift in putting on “fresh” shoes instead of just grabbing whatever my tired brain reached for.
The Rabbit-Proof Fence stopped me in a different way. Ols and I talked about the fence and the movie, and the history under the ground we were moving through. HAA was full of little practical targets, but places like that made the country feel less like a line on a map and more like something I needed to keep paying attention to.
Even the GPS was changing. By this stage I had already been let down by the Garmin, so Day 7 became one of the first days where I saved data at the end of each session instead of trusting one giant activity to survive. That created its own later weirdness with strange paces and Strava flags, but at the time it was just another practical adaptation: if the system fails, change the system.
By late afternoon I was halfway to Kalgoorlie. That was a strange and meaningful sentence to be able to say out loud. The little milestones mattered.
We had planned to push on, but around 49 kilometres we called it. That left 58 kilometres to Southern Cross and a bit of weekend shuffling, with the hope that some Southern Cross locals might join the catch-up kilometres.
Day 7 was not clean. It was leaking oil, split GPS sessions, improvised logistics, and another night of stopping short of the neat plan. The replacement itself would be sorted in Southern Cross.
But it was also 49 more kilometres east, and by the end of it we had 331 kilometres in the legs.
Images From The Day
