15th August, 2009
Further down the Gibb River Road we pull in to Drysdale Station for a night before heading up to Mitchell Falls. This cattle station is 1 million acres and was established in the 1800’s. They run a bar and restaurant as part of the park. It’s run by great people, real country and down to earth.

As we pulled up to a campsite a fellow came over and told Steve he heard a “knocking” sound as we drove past. As we were setting up, we discovered that the rear gate that opens the kitchen out had come off it’s lock. The amount of corrugations we had just traveled meant the metal had ripped completely down the bottom hinge. Not good. Paul, the son of the station owners runs a repair/mechanic shop and he managed to weld it back for us. Steve had a great chat with him about the emergencies he has to attend to, and this is where you get the hands on information about what we're doing. As Paul says, everyone travels with spare parts, axles, tyres etc, but they don't have the grease, welder, tyre pliers or any other mechanical stuff you need to actually put these spares to use. That's OK if you can pull into a station such as Drysdale, but if you're stuck in the middle of nowhere you'd have to be pretty lucky for another traveler to stop to help that has a welder in the back.

We had dinner at the homestead and Dan discovered he LOVES cauliflower! Much to our dismay – we hate it. We also met the fellow who was grading the road up to the Mitchell Falls, which I must mention was as smooth as a highway. A lot of people also told us not to bother going up to the falls as it was the dry season and there wouldn’t be enough water flowing blah blah blah! Once again we decided to make up our own minds and see for ourselves.