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Published: July 21st 2019
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After a day of driving through quite heavy rain, we indeed made it as far north as Pinnacles Desert, however it was still raining as we trudged around the weird gravestone looking rocks, so we decided to keep heading a bit north until we nearly lost sunlight.
We ended up stopping in an RAC campsite in Cervantes, where Philippe's reaction upon first driving by was 'is this the local itinerant's camp?'. His face was priceless when I told him it was our abode for the night. In fairness the campground was quite nice when we got inside, however it was all dark, as the whole coast had been hit with an electricity outage. We sat smugly in our motorhome staring out at the poor powerless vehicles - nonetheless storing the bit of power we still had, incase it did need to last the whole night. Power was restored around 8pm, and we had a quick supper before pouring Senan into his bed. The storm rose up again as we headed to bed. There's something very impressive about being lulled to sleep by the crashing waves, snug in our tin can, as a storm whirled around us outside.
After Cervantes
we continued north to the pretty coastal town of Geraldton. They've got an amazing sea frontage walk, filled with public amenities like BBQ spots and the all important playground! After chilling out visiting various seasides, driving 20minutes out of our way to score icecreams (with me at the wheel!) by day and swapping between two campgrounds over two nights, we quickly realised that, while they were both grand, after Perth and surrounding, we've become a bit spoiled in our campsite expectations, so they needed to come down a few pegs, certainly with the Gibb River Road on the horizon.
To complete set the reset button on that front, we headed a little bit inland to the Goodies Eco Camp. Notable primarily as it was a big field with one set of amenities, and overall a big surfer vibe to it. It was here that we got our first true taste of outback camping, as we were basically the only motorhome on the field. Senan was immediately befriended by Okkie, the owners dog, and spent the afternoon being followed around by him, while Philippe and I turned cub-scout and scavanged the makings of a campfire for a lovely campfire lit
evening, eating smores under the stars.
Given our flight to Broome was only 3 days away, we decided to make Geraldton our most northernly spot. We pointed the campervan south and stopped off in Dongara at a fabulous gem of a campsite by the sea. We took a walk down by the river and later on enjoyed an evening of socializing as they lit a big firepit in their shack by the sea each evening where many visitors are drawn to hangout, watching the sun set, enjoying a tipple together. Senan found some older boys to play with (and when he wasn't doing tthat he was charming the old biddies by making imaginary pancakes for them 'with syrup'... very cute!)
After Dongara we made a beeline for Green Head Caravan Park, as our change in route now meant that I could catch up with yet another colleague, who I knew was doing a similar trip in Western Australia with his wife and three kids, but we had figured out that our itinieraries didn't cross. With our change in plan we managed instead to hit the beach together for a Green Head sunset and enjoy a big
dual family meal beside the playground. It was great have some adult socializing, but it was probably even nicer for Senan to have some Dutch speaking kids to play with.
Dan and I stayed up far too late, sampling way too much Margaret River Gin (drank in volumes similar to as if it were wine, me thinks!), so our final day of driving to Perth was a more silent affair while my head recovered from the little man attacking it with a hammer. Finding ourselves with an evening left in Perth, we did what any self respecting Irish person would do - we called in on the relatives again for a cup of tea and a visit at 'Monty's house'. Over tea and some fantastic burgers we got a top up of Baby Ava cuddles, dropped off a bunch of campvan staples that we we wouldn't be bringing onwards and had a good chat with Marie and Piaras, before bidding them farewell, with promises of a visit to Den Bosch when they are next back in Europe!
After one final sleep in the Maui van, all that was left was for us to visit one last playground,
squish all our stuff back into the six bags and return our home for the past 2 weeks to the camper place, before heading back to Perth airport.
All in all I'm sure there is heaps more to see up north, and we probably even missed some gems on the way, but we had a nice trip and have used this leg to drop down a few more mental gears after the hectic days of Japan and and Singapore. We've enjoyed the big campervan and the luxury of just rocking up somewhere, pulling out a table and voila you're done - and something tells me we're going to miss that on the next leg, where we're back to camping in a tent - albeit on the roof of a 4x4 jeep!
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