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Published: November 25th 2009
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Day 209 - Kalbarri
It's a young lady's birthday day, Beth Lewis - Happy Birthday! We hope you have a lovely day and lots of fun. See you soon! It wasn’t a huge night last night but it was big enough for us to wonder if everyone would crawl from under the covers much before 9am! Having said that, there had been an element of determination from the Reeves and Elliotts to do part of the Natures Window loop walk and to avoid the heat of the day they wanted to leave camp by 8am…would they make it?!
Our plans involved visiting a ‘whole other country’ just up the road Kalbarri (!) but we figured if the timing was right we’d catch everyone along the coastal walks if they came that way later on.
In the meantime we really wanted to fix up our trip to Tasmania, time is going on and we still haven’t booked our tickets. It’s a ferry trip across so we need to have the measurements of the car and the caravan before we phone, we’ve actually already been through this once but I’ve got no idea where I wrote it all down
so this morning we did it again!
Luckily it’s a toll free telephone number as we were on hold for ages and ages before anybody answered, it would have cost a fortune! Bless her heart, the lady who dealt with us (Robyn) was great and we went through dates and various options for the crossing on the Spirit of Tasmania which will take us from Melbourne to Devonport. Good friends Jane & Tony whom we met atop Uluru have already booked their crossing and some time ago we realised that our intended dates were virtually the same. We tried for the same combination as them but the ferry is already booked out in terms of caravan space so instead go for the closest next best! We’re very excited to announce that between the 8th of February and the 1st of March we will be exploring the inner depths of Tasmania - awesome!
We’d had to walk to a call box some way away from the caravan park and by the time we got back the Reeves and the Elliotts were nowhere to be seen, excellent, they’d met their walking schedule!
Off we went to Blueholes to see
if the water looked inviting enough for a snorkel but when we got there it was low tide so instead we walked along the beach looking at the rocks pools to see what we could find. A possible baby octopus was as exciting as it got although we think we saw more things by walking than we would have done snorkelling!
There had been talk last night that Sean, Dee, Cody and Bae might come with us to Hutt River so we headed back to camp to see if they were around and to let them know we were getting ready to leave. The kids were keen but Sean & Dee had decided to make the trip from Geraldton so they stayed at camp having a relaxing chill out day in the sun.
So this ‘whole other country’ that we’ve talked about, it’s actually the Hutt River Province which is technically the second largest country in Australia! Our expectations of what to expect on arrival here are somewhat hazy! We haven’t met anyone who has actually been here already, we’ve just spoken to a lot of people who were very exited about going. What we already knew through
reading and a bit of research was that in 1970 Leonard Casley, the owner and farmer of the land seceded from the Commonwealth of Australia over a disagreement with the quotas controlling the amount of wheat production. This made Hutt River the only principality in the world to be declared without bloodshed and if we’re lucky, today we might meet some royals HRH Prince Leonard and Princess Shirley who have been the monarchs of the principality since its creation!
One thing we were expecting was a corrugated gravel road out there but instead we found a beautifully maintained, well graded one in its place that would have even been good enough for our caravan!
We travelled about 35 kms inland through beautiful farm landscape and spotted plenty of lizards crossing the road in front of us, luckily we didn’t flatten any of them! Eventually we found our way to the entrance and drive in to what is essentially a farm with its own post office, gift shop, church and tea rooms! We wander into the post office and have a nosey through some of the artefacts looking at the Hutt River currency and stamps over the years. We
are joined by an older lady and we guess immediately that this must be HRH Shirley, and it is! Bless her she was lovely and very informative about how Hutt River came to be. We both had our passports stamped (!) and chatted about how things have progressed for them over the years. We sent postcards from here too although I hadn’t thought about doing that so wasn’t totally prepared and the addresses might have been a bit messed up but hopefully Mums and Dads will get a postcard from Hutt River bearing their own stamps!
Princess Shirley was good enough to show us around the gift shop and through the small museum area that they have, it’s all very interesting and they’ve been sent some amazing things over the years from all over the world. HRH Leonard was out and about in the paddock somewhere so we didn’t actually get to meet him but one royal was enough for us! There’s a small community of people actually living here, one of the ladies came in to collect some mail while we were there but there are around 13000 Hutt River nationals dotted around the world! Perhaps we should
consider this as an immigration possibility!
What a beautifully quirky place this is, well worth the drive out and it doesn’t cost you a penny unless you want to send postcards etc and then it’s no more expensive than anywhere else. Darryl loved it here and was very impressed with all the sculptures out in the yard too.
We thanked Princess Shirley for her time and left her to attend to her royal duties, running the farm and getting something organised for her son’s birthday as he turns 62 today.
Our visit to a whole other country hadn’t even taken a full day so we managed to catch up with the others at the car park for Mushroom Rock, the excellent coastal walk from there to Rainbow Valley. It was a great little adventure with the Elliotts and the Reeves, the kids did really well and always manage to find something entertaining to do!
From there we headed back to camp for a late afternoon lunch and to start the preparation for leaving tomorrow. It’s been a few days since we were on the road, will we even remember what to do?
The evenings fishing
expedition was predictable but as always it was entertaining! This time the boys went to the river banks just in front on the camp site, beautiful little spot - no fish!
Dinner, another group effort, sprang between lobster and takeaway pizzas but eventually settled on a mixture of tachos and nachos! Dee cooked up some hummus to go with the nachos, all beautiful and the tachos were divine. A good effort people! Actually that turned out to be entrée as Carl brought down their leftovers from the fish caught by Karen earlier in the day, a huge Trevally! Magnificent and so tasty plus it proves the girls have had all the luck with the catches lately!
With dinner done, Bel & I crept off for a bit of sneaky guitar and singing time - it’s so ace to have someone to do that with on this trip - I love it!
Time for bed said Darryl. Sleep well everyone, hope to hear from you soon.
Love to all
Dar and Sar
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Alex
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Hello
Hi, are you off to Geraldton soon? Have a look at the naval memorial, there's a nice view from there :)