We are on holiday!

Thursday 25th August 2022

We packed up and left after enjoying a relatively long three night stay! Though it was a beautiful morning and tempting to fit in just one more snorkel! Bonnie drew a picture for pop-eye the galah, we said goodbyes and hit the road at 9:45, which is becoming about standard for us.

We hadn’t booked anything for Monkey Mia yet – which did allow us to stay an extra night but also had me a little worried – people we spoke to at the campground said there was no way we would get a last minute spot. We were soon back in reception and I was able to book a camp site with no problems, phew!

We decided not to stop in Carnarvon, mostly because most locals warned us to stay away from the place! 😳It seems to have the same reputation as Halls Creek. We did find a Farmgate veggie stall though, and were thrilled to be able to stock up on fresh greens – which we haven’t been buying much of, tomatoes and capsicum, which are crazy expensive in shops right now, and some of the beautifully sweet local bananas. The kids went so wild about a bag of green beans they tore into them immediately and I jumped out to buy more before we had even started the car – they must be missing greens too! 😆

A sign declared we had left north west WA. I guess that means more cooler weather! The flower carpet also changed – from predominantly purple to mostly yellow!

We stopped in to see the Hamelin stromatolites, which was very disappointing – the walk was destroyed in the cyclone last year and has yet to be repaired. We did see lots of wildflowers and some emus though!

Richie commented how nice it is to see flowers everywhere and not know if they are weeds or native, which is so true. You can just enjoy the flowers without stressing about control/damage/loss of other species! We should try and look on our own ox eye daisy that way, it would be much more relaxing!

We pulled into Shell Beach, which is quite an amazing location – a blindingly white beach made up entirely of tiny cockle shells, apparently up to nine metres deep in parts! It is quarried in parts for coquina, the white stone that forms from the shells over time. Bonnie was thrilled to find a small piece of this as we looked around. The water looked amazing, and we were tempted to go in, though it is apparently much saltier than the ocean due to the sea grass preventing flow. Given we hadn’t showered for a few days, we were feeling salty enough and gave it a miss. I did tell Bonnie maybe on the way back out, though we might also forget about that! 😬

We drove into Denham, which is the most western town in Australia. It is a cute coastal village that has a really lovely feel to it, and a beautiful calm bay. I wish we had the Hobie here, it would be amazing! We did some shopping, though only limited, given price and availability. In hindsight it probably wasn’t the best idea to avoid Carnarvon, which would have had a bigger range at the shops! We picked up ice creams for the kids, and iced coffees for ourselves, and had a little stay at the waterfront playground, that has an awesome castle made out of the coquina bricks!

Moving on, we finally made it to Monkey Mia around 4pm. We set up in a well kept campground – they somehow have an amazing cover of grass on the sand! I imagine it would get quite packed here, but at the moment there are just a few scattered campers here – different in the caravan section of course!

We had much needed showers, and the kids and I had a very quick explore before it got dark. We weren’t allowed to park our trailer in the campsite, so we decided to use the camp kitchen on site – which is by far the fanciest we’ve ever seen at a campground! The kids enjoyed sitting and drawing at one of the tables – the problem with our camping set up is that the chairs are quite low for the table, and the kids find it hard to use it for drawing and writing! Richie made burritos for dinner, then we were all straight to bed!