Day 13

A 20 minute rain shower made packing up interesting.  Thankfully we weren't planning on travelling far so the tent could be packed away soaking wet, no problems.

Yesterday I queried the caravan park manager what he knew about dieback, as I had seen signs in the area indicating it's presence is near.  He said "It's everywhere.  Everywhere you look is infected with dieback".  Given that the land in this area is managed by the Shire of Esperance, it's obvious they don't give two hoots about stopping people from transferring the disease other than by putting up a few warning signs.

Given that we'd probably driven through dieback infected areas the previous day, and that the landcruiser had more than it's fair share of mud than most of the other vehicles around here (a small portion of Merrivale Road from two days prior was being transported in our mud guards) I thought it was appropriate to wash it all off before entering Cape Le Grand National Park.  There would have been a couple of bucketloads of mud that was pressure-washed from underneath.  Car wash owner would be rather pissed off if he'd known.  Too bad.

We took the bitumen road into Cape Le Grand NP.  We checked out both campgrounds before settling on site no. 1 of the first camp ground we checked out (Le Grand Beach).  The waitress from Condi pub was right - the camp sites at Le Grand beach were bigger and better.

As we were setting up the tent we thought we could hear jet skis or motorcross bikes off in the distance, which was odd for a national park.  We could also hear frogs in the creek just behind our campsite.  After a while we had decided that the two noises were correlated and that the frogs there making some weird noise that sounded like someone accelerating a dirt bike up a motorcross jump.

Weather was cloudy, but not cold or rainy.  There were a couple of other campers in the area, but none within earshot. I had already decided we should spend a couple of nights here since there were a number of things to see and do in the park.

We sat around camp relaxing all afternoon, as you do when you're on holidays, listening to the frogs on their motorbikes.

Shortly after going to bed Morgs heard something scratching at the tent on her side, which was starting to freak her out.  We got out expecting to find a possom or similar animal, but instead found a 10-15cm wide crab trying to make a sneaky sideways exit.  He never returned, but we still named him Scuttles McCrab (I wanted him to be called Scratchy McCrab, but Morgs didn't think it sounded very endearing). Unfortunately I forgot to get his picture.

No pictures worth loading for today's blog.  Sorry.