4th August 2022 - On the road, 1st night Payne’s Find

1st night I suggested we stop at Paynes Find and camp out the back of the pub and enjoy a pub meal to ‘celebrate’ being on the road with our new van.Wish I hadn’t bothered. Prices were over the top for meals like steak, lamb chops etc etc so we chose the Burger option, seriously they were barely average at $24 & $17 … probably the least enjoyed burger I have had. We live & learn. Plus $10pp to park behind the pub, never again. Our next few nights we bush camped and way nicer. We camped a night around 150k south of Port Hedland on the Great Northern Highway and the rain came pouring down, visibility was literally 100 metres and with dozens of road trains going both ways it made for an ‘interesting’ drive .. it was rain and overcast for most of the trip until we were approximately 150k south of Broome. With the new van having a Lithium battery system it was excellent to be able to use the electric toaster, microwave  and coffee machine but with very little solar and the DC2DC charger not set up initially to accept a charge from the vehicle our batteries got to 66% .. nothing to be alarmed about but we were relived to see the sun shining in Broome. A phone call to Masterpiece and soon I was talking to Remon the owner who sent me some information on setting up the DC2DC App so our car will charge the batteries whilst driving. Hopefully I’ve done it correctly, if not it’s another call. With no vacancies at all in Broome we decided to continue on and caught up with our relly’s The Billy’s at Willare Roadhouse & Park Ground. Connected to power and water, the batteries were soon back to 100%, we used the washing machine and AC .. we also indulged in a great meal of Mexican Tacos, all you can eat for $25pp.. it made Paynes Find look like the rip off that it was. So now the 4 of us are moving on tomorrow to a camp beside a river for a few days. It will be good to start moving slowly and not be filling up the diesel tank every two days at around $500 a time