18th Nov – Known as the Golden Mile


We awoke to a fantastic day, 28⁰C and clear sky's, The Sargent was in full flight and before we knew it we were doing a 5km run which took us to the end of Burt St Boulder and back to the caravan park before breakfast!
 







The tour was scheduled for 9.15am so we gathered our gear, got changed and headed to town! The boys were certainly excited about the tour and thank goodness Dan (Devastatingly Always Handsome) was a fantastic tour guide. The tour was very interesting and covered the history of KCGM including, maintenance, fuel farm, processing plant and some general facts. Did you know each of the 40 Haul trucks weigh 166 tonnes, hold 3790 litres of fuel and carry 240 tonnes of ore. They have a top speed of only 55kph. An amazing fact about Kalgoorlie, was how the original roads where made from the tailings from the mine, only later did they discover a new process to remove the residual gold from this material. They then decided to pull up all the roads and process the gold and re laid new roads. Believe it or not they still made a profit from the project!



Following the tour we visited the Museum in Hannen St, this took us to the top of the tower where we saw the storm coming in rapidly!!! Its then we headed to Charlottes lookout to get a better view of the town and approaching weather.......... we weren’t disappointed, it only took 5 minutes for it to hit the town!






As Riley has said we honestly thought our camper (affectionately now known as ‘Kayos’) was a goner. As we headed back to the camp site there was debris flying across the road and we had to keep an eye out for flying roofs, and flooded roads, some intersections were completely submerged!  We returned to find the camper beginning to buckle under the force of the storm and high winds, we managed to tie off the camper roof to 2 trees adjacent to our site.....luckily we didn’t have to buy a new camper!!!
So what do you do in a storm.........well we headed to a backyard style micro brewery that had really nice beer that even Bell had a drink! The owner at the brewery told us he had lived in Kalgoorlie for 20 years and never seen anything like the storm we just experienced. After reflecting on just how lucky we were we drove around town to see just how much damage had occurred, even the airport was hit and we saw a plane flipped onto its roof.....wings.....upside down!



https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/severe-weather/heavy-rain-hail-high-winds-smash-kalgoorlie-in-wild-wa-weather-ng-b88664477z







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