Stephen has been involved with WASO chorus during the past week. Although they only had a small segment in the concert they had been having rehearsals each night from Tuesday, with a performance Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Eversley and I had tickets for Saturday afternoon, which meant we were free on Friday night. So, Eversley had her first overnight in the Winnie and I had my first experience of sleeping in the overcab bed.

It was very hot during the day and we decided to follow the pattern of leaving quite late in the day. I picked E up at her place in Gwelup, then we drove to Mullaloo Beach, ordered fish and chips, and spent half an hour there waiting for them to be cooked. We went over the road and sat on the grass. As people passed us with their fish and chip orders we asked them what number they were, and this gave us a way of timing the orders.

We took the fish and chips back to Pinaroo Point and found a spot near the lawn to park. We took our meal down to the beach to watch the sunset. On a warm evening (we still had a warm easterly blowing), it was quite heavenly even though I managed to get sand on my fish. We had a tiny bottle of bubbly to share. We walked down to the water to paddle and wash our greasy fingers afterward.

I set up the bed in the front part of the overhead cab, pushing all the stuff we keep stored to the back. With both windows open this made for a fairly comfortable spot, though the foam mattress is very hard. We went to bed at about 9.30 as we were so tired, with the strong, warm easterly wind still blowing and quite high humidity. It didn’t cool down after midnight. I had the ladder set up to reach the bed and climbing up and down at night would be the main negative about sleeping up there. A foam sleeping pad would make it a comfortable bed.

Eversley had bought her own sheets and pillow for the lovely french bed in the corner. This has a very good mattress bought by a previous owner of the Winnie for $1,700.

We got up at about 7.30 and had tea/coffee before going over to the beach for a swim. It was very calm with only a few swimmers and fishermen out. However, people had begun to bring their jet skis down and there was a section of the beach already set aside for them. We were aware of small waves coming from them as they sped through the water.

Then it was time for showers, followed by breakfast. We headed home at about 10.30 a.m. We were glad to take advantage of the unusual situation of Stephen being busy with singing, which he loves, and me wanting to camp at the beach overnight and wanting company.

On Friday morning I went over to Ken Peachy Caravans to get a quote for installing a 12V fridge. I was hoping to get their recommendation and that proved to be a false hope. However, after lots of research we decided on a fridge that will suit us and also them in terms of having a installation frame.

We ordered the fridge ourselves as it was on sale with free shipping to private customers, and it will be delivered directly to them. The fridge has an upright side opening fridge section at the top and a drawer freezer at the bottom, each running on a separate compressor. We are able to fit a slightly larger 12V fridge in the space where the three way fridge sits as it takes up less space and we also found an unused six inches at the bottom of the cabinet.

The Winnie is booked in for the 20th February to have the new fridge installed. That allowed five days for shipping, plus a couple of extra, as advised by KP staff.

For our night away we used a combination of cooler bags and the fridge freezer which I had managed to get fairly cool on gas before putting in two freezer bricks. The only thing in there was yogurt for breakast. The wind was very strong, with gusts coming from the rear of the van, which meant that the flame wasn’t blown out immediately, but with the shifts in wind direction it was pretty sure to blow out if I didn’t switch off.