The park next to the road bridge in Denmark was the meeting place with John & Sue at 7.30am to re-join & continue our journey together, it’s good to be together again.  We all had different adventures & a great time catching up with relatives we unfortunately do not get to see too often because of the great distance. The riverside park at Denmark is a pretty spot & very quiet at that time of the morning.  The highway to Esperance is very interesting & different, there is approximately 100 metres on either side that is preserved bushland before breaking out into either plantation hardwood or wheat & canola.  So the highway drive is a treat with the various colours & shapes of the wildflowers as well as all the small birds skittering across the road.  Every now & then a huge wheat storage complex would appear, complete with tall silos & ground storage under tarpaulins.  The trees are different in this part of Western Australia, they are tall & spindly with a sparse collection of leaves right on the top branches.  The road is following the hills up & down & generally fairly straight.  The wheat is not as advanced as the wheat further north that we have passed, the canola is just as yellow, sometimes so brilliant it hurts the eyes.

Ravensthorpe was our lunch break stop & we parked in a small park in the middle of the small town after about 350km of travel.  Tereza & I were sitting on a rock eating when, to our great surprise Jason & Michelle Kingma & children said hello.  I work with both Jason & Michelle in Canberra & we met in Kununurra previously on this trip.  They said that they had also stopped for lunch & were walking up the street, saw the Kimberley Karavan & wondered if it was mine.  We had a great catch up chat, places we had been to, things we had done and surprisingly we had been to many of the same places & did the same things. The kids were anxious to get to the playground, they are such lovely children it’s great that they can travel with them, what an adventure for them.

Just out of Ravensthorpe we passed the mothballed big nickel mine, recently sold by BHP to a Canadian company. In the boom year of 2007 nickel reached a price of US$50,000 per ton.

As we got close to Esperance, the farms changed from wheat/canola to sheep then on the flat land leading into Esperance the farms were all large dairy farms with healthy Friesian or Jersey cows.  After 550kms of driving & 6 ½ hours we reached the Esperance Caravan Park & got sites next to each other.  After set up we went on a scenic tourist drive around the coast, following the lookouts, headlands & beaches around then headed back into town past Pink Lake (which is blue).  The ocean & beach scenery is stunning, again the colour of the water is amazing & the granite islands, boulders & cliffs look fantastic.  Today was overcast & cloudy so the photos are even more off the mark of showing the true beauty of it all.

At the main lookout we saw a few cars that were taking part in a treasure hunt/trivia event & two cars stood out, a pair of Jowett Jupiters from the early 1950s.

Dinner was very easy tonight, a fisherman’s basket from near where we refuelled.  The red emperor fish was delicious, as was the rest of the meal.  We had a quite get together with John & Sue with a nice red & discussed our plans for the next few days crossing the Nullarbor Plain.

The days are cooler & the nights are cold, it’s about the same temperature as at home in Canberra.  We are definitely heading home now. We are talking more & more about when we want to be home (Ron is due back at work on October the 1^st).  There is more of an urgency now.  Do we really want to see another beautiful beach or just cut it out because we have a long way to go & we are running out of time?