On The Road: Yardie Homestead Caravan Park, Exmouth, Coral Bay

Tonight we find ourselves in a little chalet (in the Cape Grand National Park region), at the Yardie Homestead.

We pulled up at the caravan park at around 4.00 p.m. asking to book a cabin for two nights so that we could spend some time tomorrow doing the rounds of the national park.

It's a long weekend here in Western Australia. We were told in Denham that the public holiday does not have much impact on Coral Bay and Exmouth. How wrong they were.

Coral Bay (yesterday) was packed like Sydney on New Year's Eve! But we didn't have much choice as to where we stayed because we'd driven around three hundred and fifty kilometres and there was no way we were going to drive any further.

Still it wasn't a bad night at the caravan park, had a little bit of rain overnight but there was nothing to show for it in the morning.

All day the clouds have hung low in the sky, grey and sometimes ominous.

Every time you speak of rain to the locals in northern West Australia, they simply say: it never rains here. Or: the clouds hang about with nothing happening.

When we asked at the Exmouth Tourist Information Centre this afternoon they simply said that a storm is predicted for tomorrow night and the clouds have been hanging about for a month.

The woman at the caravan park reception told us that they had no cabins left but she did have a chalet for an enormous amount of money which we weren't prepared to pay so asked for a powered site for our tent instead. She lowered the price of the chalet but we still weren't prepared to fork out that much money, then she dropped it again, it was starting to sound tempting. So we took it. As she drove around with us to open it up and put out the day bed on the verandah, Honey Pie mentioned that it was a shame he'd forgotten the bottle of red...I have just the thing, she said and before we knew it she'd disappeared and reappeared with a beaut bottle of Merlot...my favourite, so if this blog seems garbled...blame the wine!

After checking out the lodgings we headed off to the national park which is only four or five kilometres down the road...stopped at a little spot on the ocean and as we made our way back to the main road we were confronted by wallaby after wallaby. This was enough to convince Honey Pie that we should head back to the caravan park as we might encounter too many roos on our way back if we ventured too far into the national park.

We'd already had a light shower, but by the time we'd returned 'home' the rain was becoming quite steady. Then it got windy, then the rain got heavier, then it was quite a squall. Hey, we are so pleased that we decided to take the offer of the chalet up!

And did I mention, Andrew's cooked a yummy roast chicken and three veg dinner?

And the Merlot is just mmmm.

The only thing missing? The perfect sunset, but here's one from last night at Coral Bay. And we did do some sight seeing on the east side of the national park...I have three words only to describe what I saw: Oh my God!