The morning was great, a quick 70km into town.
No, really. I left early but stopped for a photo break and a poo stop (poo stops are important, the group seem to attach a lot of importance to them). Then Bindi and Jonas caught up and we basically played the whole way. Seeing if we could wind our spin rates up to silly levels (Jonas seems to sit at 110-ish most of the time, and Bindi is not much slower). Bloody racer kids. But anyway, we sped along at about 30kph most of the way. Knowing it wasn't far meant we could afford to arrive stuffed.
We are staying at a motor camp just outside town, because there are two Hedlands. Port Hedland is tourists, and South Hedland is the "new" industrial area. There's some history here, something like there was an aboriginal camp where South Hedland is now and at some stage it was "improved" and all the commoners were shipped out there to clean up the tourist zone. I could be wrong.
The camping ground is just before the Hedland turn-off, about 5km from South Hedland and right next to the airport. It's quite nice, and the swimming pool allows me to find and fix a hole in my Thermarest (self-deflating air mattress). Having only a fly becomes a slight disadvantage in camp grounds, as it's hard to get a complete enclosure unless I want something about 50cm high. And we don't want any more complaints about nudity, do we boys and girls? (in Broome someone complained about the number of boobs being waved about). We spend some time bumming round, biking into town (or not) and I find a brazing torch to fix my mudguard. When it was being lifted on or off the van while I hitched one of the supports got broken off.
Not that it really mattered, it hasn't rained since I joined the ride and it's not going to until we get to Perth apparently. As part of my experiments in speed I've got a Snafu tire on the back (130psi) and am running all the tyres close to their rated pressures. I've also removed the mudguards and checks the toe in (again). Things are definitely better now, I think it's mostly tire pressure.
We drive out to the beach for sunset and beers. Tali (of course) runs the kilometre or so to the sea and swims, the rest of us sit round talking and drinking. It's a nice chance to relax away from "the group" (it's amazing how halving the number of people changes the atmosphere.
Saturday is a rest day, and I took a rest from the diary. I think the trike fixing and beach actually happened on the rest day, but who knows. I spent some time hunting cheap Internet but had no luck. So I paid the $11/hr that seems to be standard up here to write email.