We started today with a tour of Broome, the port and some of the beaches. The seaside and blue ocean are really beautiful. Maybe not so much the town. This was in some sense a final goodbye to Broome as I cannot imagine we will be back here again.
With the goodbyes done we headed to the start of the Great Northern Highway (GNHW) just past the Willare Roadhouse. About 60km down the GNHW we stopped for lunch at a truck stop under the shade of a lone tree. To our surprise during lunch we got a "Hi, are you there" text message from Brendon. The surprise was because our lunch spot was in the middle of no where and we only had intermittent signal. Any way the upshot was a series of broken communication which informed us that he had destroyed a tyre and needed both the spare tyre we were carrying for him and the sealant he uses to run the tyres without tubes. We was at Mt Barnett Roadhouse in the Manning Gorge campground which was only 500km (approx) from our location. And by-the-way the roadhouse does not sell beer so can you bring some. Amazing how one incident can turn a quiet day of driving into a rescue mission. You can see Brendon's version of this event on his Instagram page brenwell.
The remainder of the day was taken up returning to the start of the GNHW, diverting to Derby for beer and fuel and making the long boring trek to the start of the dirt section of the Gibb River Road.
We camped the night in a rough side road about 100m off the Gibb about 20km short of the Lennard River. There was a lot of smoke in the air from burning-off and as the day-light faded we could see red from the fires being reflected from the smoke/clouds.