Esperance and Cape Le Grand

We stopped in briefly at the town of Norseman to collect our certificates of completion for crossing the Nullabor. We also had a play on the horse statue. The town is named for the horse who first discovered gold here. He was pawing the ground (hoofing the ground??) and uncovered a nugget of gold. The town is nice enough, but I would recommend staying at Fraser Range any day!

 From Norseman we turned south and headed to Esperance. It has been really interesting watching the many changes to the foliage on the sides of the road. Doing such long drives makes it more obvious. The wildlife seems to remain the same (crows and eagles and dead kangaroos) but the trees get taller and more spindly and then shorter and scrubbier. Then taller and thicker and then shorter and grassier. This leg we have started to see the grasses which have been called ‘black boys’ in the past. I don’t know the correct name, but they have the most wonderful tall stalk-like flowers.

Esperance is a beautiful town, with a lovely beach and a GREAT view from our caravan park. We checked out the wonderful museum there. It has the usual assortment of old machinery and locomotives and also more chunks of Skylab, the space station which fell to Earth here in the 1980s. We were also able to get a little shopping done, and restock our fruit and veg supplies. I was getting sick and tired of ham and cheese sandwiches!

We had been struggling with finding some new books for the children since leaving Adelaide. There are so many bookswaps about, but they are all adult novels and Lexie is the one who most often has run out of books. We have looked in every Target, Coles, Woolies, IGA, newsagent and toy store from Adelaide to Esperance and without fail our options have always been the SAME one Wimpy Kid book. Every place stocked plenty of adult books, and lots of picture books, but nothing for children in between. We have bought Lexie lots of books from Op Shops, but they tend to be old fashioned books – think Enid Blyton era… And then we found a REAL BOOKSTORE in Esperance! Yippee!! We bought up big time, in the hope we might get to Darwin with what we had bought. But Lexie has already finished 2 of the novels, so that hope is fading. We may have to get her to use her Kobo more often now… Angus should be fine with what he has in stock though.

We also headed out from Esperance for a day trip to Cape Le Grande. It is simply beautiful and reminded both Dunc and I of Wilson’s Prom in Vic. It’s about a 45 minute drive from Esperance and we hadn’t learnt our lesson about the early sunsets in WA, so we ended up there right on dusk. It was simply breathtaking! We walked on the beach at the cape, and at Lucky Bay and checked out the peak called Frenchman’s Cap. There’s a campground with an amenities block, but there was no way that Bertha would fit in there. It would be a simply beautiful place to stay, though.