Yalgoo soon disappeared in the rearview mirror and we headed west to Mullewa . The roads are straight out here , no wasted space on corners . The wildflowers were coming at us more regularly - after all we are going into Wildflower Country . The harshness of the outback softened slowly , more trees & shrubbery lined the road .
I mentioned the straight roads , it kept going & going .
We started to see a low growing mauve/blue/grey flowing plant that looked like it was spreading everywhere beside the road.
Before too much longer we had arrived into Mullewa , found the park and set up . We decided to do the shorter of the wildflower drive loops - the Northern Loop - so packed lunch and headed out .
The road was the original road to the Murchison area , one stop was at Wolya Well , an important stop for water along the way . There were lot's of yellow everlasting daisies still flowering , and the remains of some white .
The mauve/blue/grey plant was increasing in number and space .
Then it was all over the place , must be it's time to shine .
Many other native shrubs are coming out in flower as well .
We found the mauve/blue/grey plant was a surprise - the flowers are actually white , the mauve/blue /grey are just window dressing to attract the insects for pollination .
The drive took us to the Greenough River and Noondamurra Pool. There was water in the river and small fish , it was an important place for the aboriginies , being a more permanent water hole . Like most rivers in WA , they tend not to flow unless they've had sufficient rainfall - generally they're dry and running underground .
From here we turned not a gravel road that had the first lot of Smoke Bush that we'd seen this year , also this pink flowering shrub as well .
The smoke bush makes a real statement - Look at me !! A real standout amongst the greenery .
Bindoo Hill Nature Reserve was next and this is where we saw the most flowers - the road in was supposed to be a no through rd , but we followed it all the way around the boundary and met up with the gravel road a bit further down the road . We found flowers of all colours and styles - excellent !
The reserve gave way to wheat fields all around , those that weren't wheat were canola . The drive has information boards at strategic locations , along with the mandatory laser cut steel figures . The info boards have notes about the early history of the area and make the drive an education as well . The only detracting thing was the flies - there were thousands of them and they wouldn't leave you alone , so standing outside and reading the boards was out of the question - if you couldn't get close enough with the ute , you just didn't read them !!
Further down another road we found our mauve/blue/grey plant again - this time it was in several different colours .
Last call before the Pioneer Cemetery was a section called the Waterfalls - again not flowing , but had some pools of water . The waterfall section was a drop of about 2m in the rock bed to another pool , it would be great with water flowing but if water was flowing , you probably wouldn't have access to the gravel road - they close the roads to protect them from the vehicle damage when they get saturated .
And with that done we headed back to the van after a long but satisfying day . Here's a map link - have a look at it in satellite view , it will show the wheat/ canola fields : - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HL5DzUCq3Qss3piSSptJCPvXMnuD6Djp&usp=sharing
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