Final blog on 10 day trip

I’ve been wanting to finish the story, but we’ve been busy since we got back and this has been on the back burner. We enjoyed our last day on the road. Stephen did some of the driving and now that I am so comfortable driving the van myself I find that I am as comfortable with Stephen driving as I am when he is driving our car. That will be wonderful when we take our trip north this winter as it means we will be able to take turns without me feeling stressed.

We stopped in Harvey and drove into the town, rather than just pulling off at the Visitor Centre. We were chasing shade and found some near the railway station. However, it only seemed a relatively short time until we were in the sun again. We drove back to the highway and pulled off near the river to have a cup of tea and cake.

We had another short break in Pinjarra where we did a FaceTime with Matt and went to the toilet. There is a nice overnight place here where we have stayed previously. It would be a good place to come on the night before Fairbridge as we can free camp, empty our toilet and grey tank, refill our fresh water tank and then get into the queue early to get a good spot to camp.

My suggestion was to stop at our shopping centre and have tea before going home. Otherwise we would arrive tired and hungry and get a bit grumpy unloading. We had a meal at a tiny Chinese restaurant, very tasty, with drinks from the tea house next door.

We feel it was a great little trip where we had some varied camping experiences. The disadvantages of staying in the caravan park were outweighed by the pluses of being within walking distance of a small shopping centre and some great resort cafe/restaurants, plus having only a short walk through the park to the beach. We could be partly in the shade during the day and had a nice spot with concrete and grass for our outdoor area.

Our favourite place to stay was Olive Hill Farm with it’s large, fairly private campsites, clean and attractive long drop toilet, beautiful little woodland walk to the river and hospitable hosts.

Augusta was the most beautiful place with stunning beachside parkups during the day and a good enough campsite for overnights. For the price we have no complaints.

The most difficult place to stay was Conto due to being in a sheltered spot with high humidity and no breeze, and mozzies. Still, we got through it and really enjoyed our morning walk.

The biggest surprise was having a sprinkler come on at 2.30 am at Busselton Farm. Thankfully it was easy to move to another spot.

We loved being able to meet up with Marie and Geoff for lunch in Augusta. We hadn’t planned it in advance.

We had red grapes, which are seedless, and now we have green grapes which have seeds. We’ve been sharing them with our neighbours. Stephen did some good pruning last year and we have bumper crops.