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Published: August 22nd 2012
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Day 52 – Monday 20
th August – Quobba to Denham/ Francois Peron National Park
Woke up this morning to find a heavy mist blanketing the area. And to find that my right eye that had been sore and scratchy yesterday was no better. It felt sore and uncomfortable, as though a piece of sand was stuck inside my eyelid. Optrex didn’t help so we decided that a trip to the optometrist in Carnarvon would be the right thing to do to get it checked out. While we were waiting for the tent to dry off, Luke went for a quick fish off the beach to try his luck once more. Still no fish!
Packed up and back in Carnarvon we went the medical centre to ask about an optometrist. He was booked out for the day and so were the doctors, so they recommended I went along to the hospital to get my eye checked out. It felt a bit dramatic and unnecessary going into the emergency department with a bit of a sore eye, but as it has been drummed into me, you can’t mess around with your eyesight so it had to be done. The
triage nurse thought it would be “quite a while” before I was seen by a doctor but couldn’t specify how long “quite a while” might be. So I sat in the waiting room with the laptop and Telstra modem posting blog updates while Mark and the kids went to explore the heritage sites in Carnarvon.
By the time the doctor had checked out my eye and established that there was nothing embedded in my eyelid (he gave me drops to settle down the irritation), Mark’s self-guided heritage tour was finished too and we could leave Carnarvon heading south. However, there was one more treat in store for us in Carnarvon – the Big Dish. This is the Satellite Earth Station Heritage site, Australia’s first satellite communications ground station built in 1966 and is basically a humungous satellite dish. We had a quick climb half up the base of the dish and took some photos, then hit the road again. We will watch the film “The Dish” with the kids when we get home to illustrate the history of the satellite dish to them.
The rest of the afternoon was spent driving and driving, listening to Harry Potter and
the Half Blood Prince, aiming to get to Denham, the base for Monkey Mia resort, before dark. We decided not to camp at Whalebone Bay, a free campsite 20kms south of Denham, because you are only allowed to stay for one night. As the plan for tomorrow is to get to Monkey Mia by 7.30am to watch the dolphin feeding/ interaction, that would mean getting up way too early and packing up the tent which is avoidable hassle. The alternative was bush camping in the Francois Peron National Park at Big Lagoon campsite. We worked out that we should just be able to get there before dark. And that’s what happened. Once inside the park we had to drop our tyre pressures to drive along the soft tracks in the orange sand. It was tough going but we arrived at the small campsite right at the edge of a lagoon literally as the sun disappeared on the horizon. That meant being able to select the right spot and put the tent up before it got dark. The campsite has a very clean drop toilet and a gas barbecue , on which we cooked up a quick pasta dinner for ourselves.
Monkey Mia tomorrow morning – we are all really looking forward to this!
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