Wednesday 15 August – About ten minutes after we woke this morning, Grant said: ‘Isn’t it nice to have a lie-in’.  Then he got up and looked at his watch only to discover that it was 6.15am!!  Some lie-in!  So we sat around having breakfast, me doing the giant Sudoku from last Friday’s Herald Sun (the only paper we have bought since leaving Victoria – and we got that on Saturday), having extra cuppas, etc, until it was a civilized time to go to visit Andrea for morning tea.  I gave her a call at a bit before ten, she asked us to get some milk and bring with us and she whipped up a batch of scones.

She and Craig live about 10km west of the town on a 300 acre property, growing mangoes and red fleshed grapefruit.  Craig’s brother and his family also live on the property, and there is another house on it, which Craig’s parents live in for six months of the year.  They have a very dear little 6 month old daughter, and are actually heading to Melbourne tomorrow for a ten day break, so we are lucky we were able to catch up with them.

Anyway, we were only there for about five minutes when Craig’s Mum Rose came in and joined us.  We were there for about an hour and a half, leaving with a bag of huge red grapefruit.

From there we made our way back towards the town and did a bit of local sightseeing, first going a few km north of town to Ivanhoe Crossing, a causeway across the Ord river which is underwater all year, but impassable in the wet season.  There was a bloke fishing there, but it is important to keep alert because it is also home to salt water crocodiles.  I think he was just stupid.

 Ivanhoe Crossing

Next stop was a few km from there when we called into the sandalwood factory and shop.  Indian sandalwood is grown here very successfully, and we watched a short video of the growing and process, then browsed the products they make.  A couple of kilometres from there, our next port of call was the Hoochery – the only legal rum distillery in Western Australia.  You can do tastings there (Grant did, but I had a cuppa …. I know …. BORING!!) and some of their brews are well over 50% proof. Grant’s was 57.7%.  We had lunch there, fish and chips – well, barramundi and chips.  I’m afraid I can’t see what is so wonderful about barramundi.  It was nice – nothing wrong with it, but I far prefer red salmon, but the chips were very nice.

After lunch we drove back into town and went to the lookout Kelly’s Knob where we only had to do a short climb to get to the viewing spot.  You certainly get a broad picture of the area.  Last place we visited was Rockalong Stonework – a workshop and display area/shop where the famous zebra rock and a variety of other interesting stones are cut and polished.  It was interesting to see the patterns in the rock and the colours were really lovely, but very expensive.  It was very hot by now, and though the fellow had all the fans on, I was again running with perspiration.

So it was time to go back to the van for a cuppa and a cool down.  Once we had done that we walked across the road to what is called Celebrity Tree Park, where most of the trees have been planted by celebrities of some ilk, starting in the early 1980’s, and with the most recent planted on 12 July this year by Julia Gillard.  All sorts of people had planted trees – Prime ministers, Princess Anne, Olympians, athletes, musicians, comedians e.g Jimmy Edwards, etc, etc.

Back at camp I did a load of washing before tea, checked out that our new camcorder worked well (it did) and am now completing the day’s tasks by catching up with the blog.  Tomorrow we are going to Lake Argyle for the day, so more about that tomorrow.