Cape Range

Today we travelled down the coast 590 km and onto Cape Range, where there is the  Cape Range National Park and Ningaloo Marine Park.   We are staying at the Yardie Homestead caravan park.  We're not right on the beach - you stay at the national park to do that and people line up at the gate from 7am to get a spot.  We decided not to bother,  we're sheltered from the wind should it decide to pick up and we have flushing toilets, which are a bonus.  Tomorrow we are going out to the beach, where the turtles are swimming and laying their eggs.  Apparently there are clown fish to snorkel with and reef sharks.  yay.

Everything packed away nicely this morning.  Our clean up yesterday makes everything feel better.  We said good bye to our neighbours, and goodbye to the Sturt Desert peas outside the fence on the road, and drove off with our newly sprung car looking much better than when we'd driven in.

As we travelled further from Karratha, the traffic eased and we realized how busy it had been around there.  Lots of mining trucks and cars zipping to and from the port and the mines and the gas plant.

We drove through more red dirt and spinifex and scrubby bushes.  often there were little whirl winds on the horizon, with red dirt spiralling up high in the sky.  A few times the whirl wind was throwing dried spinifex up into the air in rolling tosses almost like a juggler, and once we drove through a whirl wind and were buffeted around for a second or two.

 I spent most of the drive reading Joseph and Dominic their science books.  Dominic is learning about inventions and technology. I'm not sure how many of the experiments he'll get done, but he enjoys finding out about it and it's something we can do in the car.  Joseph is doing chemistry this term, and I want him to read through the book Dominic used last term which was very interesting.  it was quite a battle to get them to listen long enough and well enough to actually understand what I was reading.  Never mind, Dominic enjoyed answering the questions for Joseph - shows how much he took in from last term.

An interesting thing about reading  both books at the same time was that we realized the action of Radioactivity was discovered and named by the Curies about the same year that Guglielmo Marconi  invented the radio.  I wonder which one was named first, and whether the two have any connection (apart from the very obvious Latin root...)

We can't believe just how remote it is in this part of WA and the other bits we've been visiting since Darwin.  Today it was about 250km between petrol stations, and the internet and phone connections were rare.  

Driving out onto the cape, we had to avoid numerous sheep, which we haven't seen before on this trip, who loved to run across the road just in front of our car.  They seemed to enjoy grazing between the large termite mounds with their lambs.   We passed one emu trying to blend in with a bush, and doing a very good job of it, and another emu with his four or five teenage sons (not sure if any of them were guys or girls, but you get the idea) running away around a tree.  Joseph said they kept bobbing their heads, trying to hide in the ground.  We also passed a snake playing dead in the middle of the road...

We passed the air force base and drove into the main town, Exmouth, which has a lot of new canals built and new fancy houses around the canals.  The big difference between them and, say, Sanctuary cove on the Gold Coast is these houses are all built of corrugated iron.  Colourbond.  I have never seen so many colourbond houses as in WA.  What amazes me is that they look so good.

The water seemed a much darker blue than at Broome or 80 Mile Beach, and I can't wait to go out and see the turtles tomorrow.  Hopefully the sky is clear and the water is too, because if it's murky....

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Vicki