Friday 21 September – All records broken today, as we actually left the caravan park and headed off for the day at 25 to 8 this morning!!!  Grant woke me up at 6 o’clock, which I thought was a bit rough as I was having a lovely sleep.  But I guess it paid off as we arrived here at Esperance at about 2 this afternoon so had plenty of time to just sit around doing nothing.

Today we travelled largely on the South Coast Highway, though from when we left Albany, we didn’t actually see the coast again until we approached Esperance.  We only went through a couple of towns in the 480 odd km we drove today – Jerramungup and Ravensthorpe, but we travelled through some really beautiful countryside.  This is certainly a most picturesque and fertile region – very hilly and today VERY windy.  The wind was sort of behind us for some of the time, but mostly a cross wind from the north-west, so you really had to drive, and not just sit back and steer.  When there were cleared paddocks (and there were lots) they were a beautiful lush green, hosting very healthy looking sheep and cattle, otherwise they were planted with canola which was mostly in full flower, displaying a brilliant yellow carpetlike cover which extended for miles. 

There were also large areas of bush – mostly tall gum trees, but with heaps of lower bushes and clumps of colourful wildflowers.  As I’ve said before, still no sightings of the swathes of colour covering the countryside, but certainly enough varieties to give you a bit of an idea of what it must be like to see the full display.  At our morning cuppa stop I managed to get a few photos of the flowers in the vicinity.

Some wildflowers we saw today.

We passed a few lizards at different times today – sunbaking on the roads trying to get the warmth from the bitumen.  I don’t know how many of them would have survived their little luxury though.  I know that at one stage when I was driving Grant asked me whether I had just seen the lizard on the road (I hadn’t), and said I could have run over it (but I didn’t).

We are at a small caravan park (43 sites) only block from the beach.  The neighbours to the back of us (well the bloke half of the couple) was trying to convince us that we should drive across the Nullarbor in two days as he did.  At this stage we have no intention of doing it so quickly, and we don’t plan on having huge days.  As we will have a full week of only one night stops and moving on every day, we don’t want to spend the full day every day driving, and get home exhausted.  But we just nodded and said we’d work on that idea and thanks for the suggestion!

Tomorrow we intend having a bit of a look at what we believe to be beautiful coastline round this area.  There are supposed to be very strong winds tonight, but at the moment it is fairly calm, so hopefully we can enjoy our sightseeing without being blown away.

Highlights of the position of the caravan park:

1.      The train runs right beside the park and toots its whistle loudly and

2.    There is a church somewhere close by and the church bells are ringing regularly, even playing a tune at around teatime.