Where's Mum Now: A Weekend Drive

We hit the road around 5am Saturday morning to make the trip to Kalgoorlie, there was little traffic except for the grey nomads crisscrossing the countryside. Nature provided us with a array of colour in the form of wildflowers that boarded the roadway and there was not much else to break the rhythm of the rolling kilometers, except for slowing the pace when passing through small towns with only a pub and service station. But there were two towns that were somewhat larger called Southern Cross and Coolgardie, with Coolgardie having several significant historic buildings as this is the place gold was first found in 1892.

Gold was found in Kalgoorlie in 1893 and it has been the main source of income for this town, with the other being in the 19th century sandlewood that was exported to China. On the edge of Kalgoorlie there's a fenced off area where you can see mounds of dirt and vegetation but nothing else until you drive through the gates to the Viewing Platform. There you see the Super Pit which is unimaginable enormous, there is no way you could take one photo of the pit as it is so extensive, you can just make out the trucks at the bottom of the pit and they look like match box toys.

Kalgoorlie for all its roughness has a wonderful main street where new developments hasn't occurred and the beautiful old buildings have been maintained giving you a feel of what it might have been like in its hay day. A visit to the museum and an evening at the Palace Hotel we left Kalgoorlie early Sunday morning for a 6 hour drive to Wave Rock.

Wave Rock is outside a small township called Hyden, it is a granite outcrop that has a wave like formation. On top of Wave Rock a retaining wall has been built to collect precious rainwater for the town and there are marked walking tracks over the rock so that visitors can appreciate the rock and the surrounding landscape.

We arrived home around 7pm after a full weekend.