The pain in Emma’s foot had not improved when we left Dampier Peninsula so Craig did all the driving again. As soon as we were booked in to the caravan park we headed to the hospital to get Em’s foot examined.

She was referred to some tests and scheduled a follow up appointment a couple of days later.

That night we ran into Owen and Suzanne who we’d met at Karijini and got to catch up on how their adventure tour there had gone. The photos of tubing, rope climbing and absailing in and through the gorges looked like an amazing experience and we were both regretting that we hadn’t looked into doing something similar.

As we didn’t know when we’d be ready to leave Derby based on Em’s foot, we couldn’t do the shopping and preparation for the next leg of our roadtrip – the Gibb River Road. Instead we spent a couple of days confined to camp, sweltering in the heat, reading or watching telly on the laptop.

Em was glad to report that her foot seemed to be improving before attending the follow up appointment at the hospital. Unfortunately the doctors couldn’t identify what the issue was or what had caused it. Deciding that she was at least able to walk around we decided to prepare to leave for the GRR the following day.

We had tried to prepare a meal plan around how long food would keep and how much space we had in our 40Ltr fridge.  We dropped off the list of meat we wanted at the local butcher to be vac-packed and collected later that day. Heading to the supermarket stocked up on tins and long-life products.  All was going well until it was time to stock up on booze. There had been trouble in town and the police had put a limit on the quantity that each person could buy. We ended up having to drive around to the four different bottle-o’s to get enough beer and wine to last the trip.

We collected it all together and spent most of the afternoon finding homes in the car and trailer for all the volume of stuff we were carrying.

Once that was done we thought we’d check out a couple of Derby’s tourist attractions and headed out to the old prison boab tree. This tree is estimated to be over one thousand years old and is an impressive sight.  After visiting the tree we headed out to the jetty. We had a short stroll out on the water before heading back to camp for an early night, eager to get moving again.