We had a very busy time at home over two nights and one day. I did all of our washing and cooked a meal that gave us leftovers for a couple of nights. I took the van to Ken Peachey and they put in a new controller for our hot water/heater. It worked for me, then Stephen had a go and disabled the system somehow. I had watched the new panel being installed and knew to take the knob off. Turned out that pressing hard on the knob had caused it to become dislocated. I reset it and found the control panel as a whole is working as it should.

Stephen attended a men only reheasal for the Mackie Street Singers on Tuesday night. That was the main reason we went home overnight, though getting the heater sorted and doing a lot of washing was also useful. There were a few other errands, but everything was finished by about lunchtime on Wednesday.

We didn’t feel like going down the Great Southern Highway as we usually do, it feels that we have been going that way a lot lately. Albany Highway is to be avoided if at all possible due to angry drivers, so we opted for the Forrest Highway instead, which lead to the idea of staying on the beach at Bunbury. It’s free, but you have to have a permit from the Tourist Information Centre and we have two nights ‘booked’ and have decided to take advantage of this and stay one more night before moving on.

The basic itinerary for this second part of our trip is to mooch around the Katanning area, but having come south along the freeway/highway that’s still over 200 kms away and we don’t feel in a great hurry to get there.

This morning we have been visiting a wetlands/bird and wildlife sanctury, about 2 kms from Back Beach. We arrived at about 10.00 a.m. and there were lots of birds to see on our walk around the swamp. It was about 3.5kms with all the little diversions to bird viewing platforms.