Another day of decisions … would we leave Lucky Bay and go back to Esperance in order to make the next days looonnng drive a bit shorter. God no! This place is just too intoxicating.
The walk down to the beach ... about 6m away from the van
Kel woke me up this morning with complaints.
Ya see we hadn’t shut the curtains properly on the van door … so the sun was now shining in directly on Kel’s eyes … and she was complaining about it. I just looked at her incredulously for a bit until the penny dropped and she remembered where she was and she was complaining about THIS sunrise waking her up.
Lucky Bay Sunrise, something to complain about?
We did want to do the Great Coastal Drive however. This is a 40km drive along the Esperance coast.
A bit of figuring out had us thinking that an hours pack up and another hours setup was not worth doing compared to a single hours drive back in to town … so we left the van and went back into Esperance.
The coastal drive is basically a tour of the beaches … and you’ve just never seen a collection of beaches like it. The first beach had us speechless and there’s about another 10 to go.
They’re all noteworthy in their own way. One with rock pools, one with an island backdrop, one popular with the surfers, one popular with the nudies … a beach for everybody. The favourite beach of WA is Twilight Beach with it’s multi kilometre stretch of wide soft sand … that we again had to ourselves. There is nothing even close to this one small region anywhere along the east coast that we know of … stay tuned we’ll let you know if we find one.
There’s even two wind farms along the way where you can do something educational … like find a geocache.
We headed inland for a bit to find the Pink Lake (that isn’t actually pink) and found a couple more geocaches along the way to the bemusement and infinite tolerance of my better half.
Check out the reflections!
Rather than take the short cut back to town, we decided to retrace our steps and again follow the coast road back to Esperance. With no squabbling in the back and a Michael Buble concert on the jukebox it was a bit of a surreal drive.
Lunchtime was well and truly upon us and on such a sunny day we found a cafe restaurant by the jetty. The kids went off to the playground as Kel & I sipped upon a Margaret River Sauvignon Blanc. “Now this is what I’m talkin’ about!”, exclaimed Kel. Garlic Prawns for me, BLT for Kel, Fettuccine for Blake and Wedges for Hannah. Fantastic!
Next stop was to see Sammy the Seal at the Tanker Jetty. We figured that Sammy would be a statue and, of course, we got the photo standing beside Sammy.
Only then did we discover the real Sammy the Seal. A more or less resident Sea Lion that hangs around near the Jetty feeding on whatever fish scraps the fisherman chuck his way.
He just suns himself on the beach and keeps an eye on the fish cleaning area and when someone starts cleaning a fish he’s off! Swimming around and playing up to the tourists and begging for food, just like a big puppy! Very cute.
We headed back to the van, grabbed some nibblies and wine. Back down to Twilight Cove again tonight for the sunset. We again had the place to ourselves. The kids went and ran amok in the sand dunes and climbed and rolled around for ages. There were a few roos grazing in the dunes too. Kel and I had a bit of a walk along the beach and dipped the toes in the not too chilly water. There was even a pod of dolphins splashing about just to top it all off.
Once Blake and Hannah saw us down in the water then they just had to have a swim … cold or not. It didn’t last long though.
Dinner was Korma meatballs and rice. Early night since we have a big drive tomorrow.
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