Apart from a couple of foxes north of Gingin we didn't see much road kill as we headed up the Brand Hwy towards Geraldton. There had been a fair amount of rain and rough weather and the roos had apparently decided there was no need or sense to be abroad.
I did see an emu, somewhere between Badgingarra and Eneabba. It was minding its own business a few hundred metres off the road, on a slope covered with mallee heath interspersed with grass-trees. You don't want to hit an emu.
It's a four hour drive to Geraldton from Perth. At Eneabba, 280 km up the road, we stopped to change drivers.
Like most small settlements along major highways, Eneabba is now bypassed. The traveller must enter by a side road, 300 m down which is the Shell roadhouse and a rest area. Most visitors are unlikely to have reason to go beyond that point. They may glance at the nearest dwellings, veiled by the low trees, but they are not going to see the general store, tavern, school, nine-hole golf course or swimming pool.
Some West Australian travellers (but few from the eastern states) may have heard that the nearby mineral sands mine was recently moth-balled. If they have, they probably don't remember the details. With all that's going on in mining these days, it was hardly news.
At the right time of the year Eneabba is the gateway to one of Western Australia's best wildflower displays. But I was there a few weeks too early and had to content myself with filling my lungs with the fresh air blowing in from the south-west across the coastal heath.
The winds are strong on the Batavia coast. They created the famous leaning trees up the road at Greenough. They power a 90 MW wind farm on the rise behind Walkaway — Randolph Stow's Haunted Land — and an 80 MW one at Emu Downs, about 70 km south of Eneabba.
The Eneabba rest area is directly across the road from the roadhouse forecourt. It offers toilets, picnic pavilions and a large Information Bay map (You are HERE) — a place to have a piss and stretch the legs. This all backs onto the sports oval, on the other side of which runs the Brand Hwy with its steady shrushing drone of road-trains, campervans and big Four Wheel Drives towing big Recreational Boats.
At either end of the rest area,