The CrossingFourth day on the Eyre Highway
A Thousand Kilometres To Balladonia
Somewhere on the cold walk into Balladonia, the total passed 1,000 kilometres. The roadhouse brought patchy communications, a dose of reality and the wonderfully odd story of Skylab.
The morning started with the usual negotiation.
Balladonia Roadhouse was about 50 kilometres away from where we were parked, and the plan was simple enough: get up, get out, and see if I could make the full distance on foot.
Simple enough, except the campervan was warm, the bed was cosy, and outside was cold and dark.
That was the first job of the day: persuade myself that leaving the van was a good idea. I wrapped up a little warmer than the day before, which helped. The yellow beanie was now very much part of the uniform, and the cold early start paid me back with another ridiculous sunrise. Fog, colour, trees, the Eyre Highway still quiet before dawn, and a couple of hours of walking in that strange quiet that only seems to exist before the day has properly started.
There were five sessions across the day: 12.6 km, 11.6 km, 7.4 km, 10.3 km and 10.2 km. Another 51.9 kilometres in total.
The conditions helped. It stayed cool and overcast, which is just about ideal when the task is to spend all day moving east on foot. The day had dawn fog, long highway, clouds, scrub, roadside markers, and one abandoned car sitting out there as if it had simply given up on its own adventure. There were also someone’s verge-side markings that seemed to point east toward a new start.
The little markers kept me amused too.
B30.
B20.
Balladonia getting closer by the hour.
And somewhere in that day, the total distance clicked over 1000 kilometres.
That was special. I noticed those numbers all the way across Australia: distances on signs, town names appearing for the first time, half-way-to-somewhere markers, parkruns-to-go, anything that could make an absurdly large distance feel measurable. One thousand kilometres was not the finish, or even close to the finish, but it was real progress. It was a number big enough to make the whole thing look less like an idea and more like something we were actually doing.
The finish came just after 6pm, at Balladonia Roadhouse.
The 1,000-kilometre milestone and reaching Balladonia on foot were different kinds of good. The roadhouse gave us fuel, water, food, showers, sleep, phone signal if we were lucky and a direct lesson in remoteness.
Fuel was more than two dollars a litre. Drinking water was similarly expensive, and water was the bigger problem. I’d assumed we could refill the campervan tank at roadhouses, especially in winter. Balladonia made it clear we couldn’t count on that.
So Plan B was to buy containers of water from the shop.
Holy crap.
It felt like the water might have been more expensive per litre than the fuel, and the fuel was expensive enough. We bought a decent supply, but it immediately raised the next question: if this was the price only 180 kilometres from Norseman, what were we going to find further along?
That was a bridge to cross later.
For that night, Balladonia gave us what we needed: a shower, a proper roadhouse meal, a chance to check out the Skylab museum, and a decent sleep before the next unpowered stretch. The internet and phone coverage were already patchy, and the next three nights were expected to be rest areas without power, so we warned people that posts, pictures and videos might go quiet for a while.
A glowing sign said Balladonia 300 metres. We had expensive water, patchy communications, Skylab and the odd fact that President Jimmy Carter had allegedly once phoned the roadhouse.
Not bad for a Tuesday.
Videos From The Day
Balladonia, Skylab, and Jimmy Carter
Balladonia Roadhouse, the Skylab story, and the alleged Jimmy Carter phone call.
Open on YouTubeImages From The Day
