Perth to Cervantes

Day #142 February 2nd, 2009

We got up at 7:30 AM to beat everyone to the nice showers, and get packed up to be out of the park at 10 AM. We still haven’t found a home for everything in the van yet – so packing up takes us a bit of time. Hopefully, we will be quicker at it as time goes on. After we checked out of Karrinyup we headed to find some caravan stores to find out why our lights and water pump were only working sometimes. Today it is HOT out, doing errands is very difficult when all you’re doing is sweating buckets. We finally found a caravan place and figured out why we were having difficulties. Our problem was easily fixed with a battery charger; a charger that charges the auxillary battery while we are plugged into 240V at each camp site, rather then the alternator charging while we are only driving. After finding one, we headed to the Big W (like a crappy WalMart) for the rest of our odds & ends, and groceries at Woolworths. After all that was done, we drove to Subway and both ate a foot long sub! Yum! And enjoyed sitting in the air conditioned restaurant. With full bellies we started our drive to our first destination, Cervantes. The drive was ridiculously hot, and because we were driving in the middle of the afternoon we had the sun just beating down on us. Jenny burnt her left arm as we didn’t think that we had to keep reapplying sunscreen on in the van. We both drank about 3 litres of cordial and we were soaked from sweating so much. We have never been so hot in our entire lives. The drive was short only about 3 hours drive to Cervantes, a little town North of Perth, but it felt like a century. There was nothing to special about the town itself, the caravan park we stayed at was a thumbs down. When we got into the caravan park it was really windy and cold, we were disappointed after being so hot driving but we were determined to swim anyways. The temperature had fallen from about 40 degrees to no warmer then 20 degrees. After setting up the van in our spot, we headed down to the beach. On the path through the dunes we saw a black snake – scared us a bit but it was more scared of us. The water was warm, clear and shallow. We only had a short swim due to the cold wind but it felt good to swim. On our way of the water, Jenny saw a jelly fish and shortly after felt something bite her heal. She was ok, nothing big – just enough to scare us. The next day after checking out of the caravan park, everyone was surprised to hear that we saw a jelly fish, as they are not known to be in that area. We had a great sleep that night, nothing else too exciting, just researched what we were going to do the next day.