Kalgoorlie - Day 11

 This schooling thing has whiskers on it!  So probably alot of it has to do with me having no training what so ever.  The kids are really doing great with the school work but I have no idea, I give them 10 spelling words each week topical to what we are doing and when I get the "you can't be serious" look I realise the words are not ok- too hard or too easy.  I think I finally worked it out tonight what to do.  So although it is school holidays in Victoria the kids and I have decided that we will work through the holidays so we dont do as much each day.  Funny tonight when Dan was giving them some words, at 1st they ignored him and then they looked to me to whether to use the words.  Clearly I am their preferred teacher - he of course wasnt impressed.  We spent the day around town, it's funny to see how differently the kids are when they are in control of their own money.  They got treated with some money from a few very kind people and they are being very sensible (tight almost) with it.  And they are keeping track down to the cent what they have spent.  The kids had time in the pool this afternoon, although it was a hot day and its 9.50pm and we still have the air con running the pool was so cold.  They had some fun though.  We went to the blast at the superpit at 5pm tonight, you just can not explain how big this hole in the ground is.  Aparently it can be seen from space.

                                                                    the superpit

A blast at the superpit

  The dump trucks are almost insignificant in realation to the hole and are just a dot on the landscape, when in real life they are absolute monsters with a man Daniels height not even measuring close to the height of their wheels.  The blast itself was weird, not knowing what to expect, there was a crowd at the lookout and we all waited trying to guess where it would go off.  We watched as all the dump trucks left the mine and lined up on the out skirts of the massive hole and a speaker at the lookout started to sound a siren to inform us we had 5 minutes, we could hear the 2 ways talking back & forwards but they were very hard to understand.  The siren sounded the whole time before the blast & during.  We felt the ground tremble before we even heard the blast, so when we saw the dirt & dust rising up it was bizzare because it was like a delayed reaction because we had felt it already.  By now we knew exactly where to look and were lucky enough to see them blast again, this time we saw the full impact and saw the dirt go up & come back down to the ground followed by the dust cloud.  It was very movie like and over in a moment.  A photography course is on my list of things to do when I get back because these amazing moments really arent being done any justice on my little digital.  We drove out to the airport at sunset to see some planes come in, quite a big airport.  I look back on conversations with Cam & Jane over the years and I just had no idea how wrong my thoughts of a little mining town-very remote etc were.  In comparison this is probably bigger in size than Mildura or Traralgon.  Back to the van to cook some tea and some school work.  We changed caravan parks this morning and were lucky enough to get an ensuite site for $39 a night- last night we paid $58 for a powered site, its hard to work out how the fees work.  The kids were so tired tonight, the heat, swimming & all the outdoor play is tiring them out so they will be back on here tomorow for sure.

                       the van at kalgoorlie, most parks have been rock rather than grassed sites

                                                                       at the superpit