OTR: Caravaning … Day 7 👉🏻 Nullarbor

Penong to Nullarbor Roadhouse
Distance Traveled: 169 miles

WOW! Hard to believe we’ve been in the motorhome for a week already!

Yes, I said in the motorhome not the caravan as I have been doing in the previous footprints. You see, I learned something from our campground host last night.

A caravan in Australia is a trailer. A Motorhome is … well, a motorhome. A trailer is a pop-up camper. And of course, there is also the campervan. So, we might be in a motorhome, but what we’re doing is caravanning! Perhaps if I ever have time, I’ll go back and fix the caravan references in the previous footprints to reflect the correction.

Anyway, with two of our sightseeing spots nixed, we moved out of the Penong area to continue our drive west. Fowlers Bay, our next planned stop, was a bust, too … for similar road conditions. Sigh! But no worries, we enjoyed the drive regardless, stopping to take photos of interesting signs … including the one marking our entrance to the Nullarbor Plain.

As the name implies … this is the treeless plain. From Latin … NULLUS and ARBOR. The Aboriginal people know the plain as “Oondiri” … meaning waterless. Appropriate … the average rainfall here is about 8 inches per year. I took a short video clip before the Nullarbor today … will have to take another one now that we’re on the Nullabor for comparison.

The plain, which was created about 25 million years ago when the land emerged from the sea, stretches some 450 miles east to west … and some 200 miles to the north from here. It’s a vast expanse of land. We’ll be driving the length of the plain and seeing a narrow strip of it on this road trip. We’ll see another narrow strip of it when we take the train back to Sydney in a couple of weeks.Leer más