On the home stretch
We picked up our car from its service in Broome and immediately hit a problem, the car wouldn’t start. We had told the mechanic this morning that it took an extra crank to start the car and to do a battery health check for us. Turns out the mechanic instead accidentally left accessories on while servicing and had drained the battery. They gave us a jump and we hit the road, headed for a free camp just outside of Port Hedland before moving on to Coral Bay tomorrow.
It was smooth sailing, a long boring drive, that is, until 180 km out of Port Hedland. We heard an odd bang and immediately pulled over. As I got out of the car, it stank of something gone wrong. We inspected the car all over though and couldn’t see what the issue was. Rein was thinking maybe an issue with our breaks. We cautiously hopped back in and slowly started driving on it again. As we reached speed I could feel shaking under my feet on the passenger side so we pulled over again. This time, when we got out the car we saw that the front passenger wheel hub was leaking grease and it was burning hot to the touch. We knew what this meant, having gone through it with the boat trailer not long before our lap, our bearing had failed. This was very disappointing as we had asked the mechanic to check the bearing and they had said they were fine. Failing 250km after a service on the same day definitely pointed to malpractice though.
The annoying thing was it had just hit 5:05pm. Everything just shut. Fortunately though, we had one bar of service. It was a call to RAC and arrange a tow truck. Driving on a failed bearing could lead to way worse problems so we had no other choice. We had to get the tow to Port Hedland, as it was closer. This was a shame as it would have been nice to dump the car back on the mechanics doorstep.
We had a few hours before the tow truck would be there so we cooked dinner on the side of the road and entertained ourselves by calling Rein’s sister. But it didn’t feel like too long before the to truck was there and we were dropped off at a caravan park in Port Hedland around 11pm. Luckily as the car was still drivable, we could limp it onto our site.
The one upside of being in Port Hedland was that Hannah and Joe were also there! They also weren’t supposed to there but errands had brought them to town.
We spent the next couple of days liaising around for the car repair. The mechanic in Broome had called in a favour to get us looked at by Port Hedland Toyota and was going to cover some of the costs.
Well eventually we got looked at and turns out our left front bearings had failed which had taken out the spindle, and the front right bearings also needed replacing. Our battery also was no good and needed to be replaced.
The Broome mechanic covered some but not all of the costs and we lost a couple of days. All in all it didn’t put us behind schedule too much and we were able to move our Coral Bay bookings around.
Driving into Coral Bay was a pleasure with all the wildflowers on show for us. It was a bit of a stressful drive through with every bang and bump causing our blood pressure to rise.
Coral Bay as always was a perfect concoction of white sand and crystal clear water. We went for a scuba dive to flex our new PADI licences which was an awesome day. We saw sharks, manta rays, turtles, dugongs and so much more.
The shark sanctuary was absolutely full this time as well! We saw about 50 sharks in the shallows.
We treated ourselves that evening to fish and chips which we ate on the cliffs watching the sunset. It was pure magic.
The next day we headed out to Five Fingers Reef for a snorkel and spear fish. Rein managed to catch a parrot fish which was fortunate as Hannah and Joe had swapped their bookings around to get a good weather window in Coral Bay so we were able to give them a fish feed for dinner.
That was our last night in Coral Bay and the next morning we had a snorkel in Bills Bay with Hannah and Joe before hitting the road.
We stopped for the night an hour out of Geraldton and then powered through the next day to Dunsborough to see Rein’s family. We were there for a couple of nights before headed back home to Perth.
And just like that, our lap was done.
We have had the most incredible time and feel so blessed to have had this opportunity. We have experienced so much and met so many amazing people. To be able to visit friends and family across the country was just so special for us. We feel so lucky. This is an incredible country and to see so much of it has been awesome. Given more time and money, we’d have loved to keep on going.
If you’ve made it this far in the blog posts, thanks for reading and following along on our journey!
