Today was different. We were booked into to have the van checked at about 7am, so off we went at 6.40am with time to spare. But we got lost, my fault, and by the time we had recovered and found the mechanic it was nearly 7.30am. However they did what they had too, changed the gearbox oil (without finding bits of gearbox in it) checked things out again and off we went with a partial clean bill of health (there is still a noise in 1st gear and sometimes when idling) for our van.

If I thought that meant an inexpensive day I was wrong, very wrong. We didn't need much but still managed to clean out the shelves at Woolworths and Coles, plus a bit of grog and some fuel. Never mind we are all set now to travel on with Kunnunnura our next big town.

Broome has suffered badly and is having a very slow start to their tourist season. All of the caravan parks are more than half empty.  Their race week is only days away and the parks are usually full by now. Part of that is possibly due to the high cost of using the caravan parks. These days the parks have large swimming pools (ours is almost big enough to float a boat and this is not an up market park) and various other facilities catering for families and well healed tourists. All of which makes life a little difficult for the average grey nomad who then avoids the expensive towns. The other factor here is that they were gearing up for James Price Point and that hasnt happened leaving a few people out of pocket and some others just demoralised.

Despite all that the town was fairly busy with a number of visitors wandering around and presumably spending money. The other thing worth noting is that the airport is fairly busy. The traffic there is the usual commercial with flights from all over Australia plus helicopter traffic both commercial and tourist. The Coast Watch planes fly out of Broome and today 5 fighter planes made the pilgrimage.