Today started out early, with a quick packup … punctuated by rain … and then we were off … almost.

First issue was that the reverse camera screen wouldn’t power up.  Looks like the new one has died too … grrr.  I’ve checked out all the signals with a meter and everything looks OK … but it won’t power up.  A short detour to the shop … but they’re closed.  Something to post off for refund/replacement.  More annoying is not having any rear view of the van.  It makes it a bit tough.

So, minor detour aside we headed off down the freeway out of town.  Only to have the car lose all power crossing an uphill intersection.  I mean, all power.  Dead in the water.

Starting it again resulted in a bucket of warning lights and still no power from the engine.  The infamous limp home mode … bloody useless mode with a van on the back, let me tell you.  I managed to get it off the road and after a bit of mucking around all the systems seemed happy and we set off again.  Only to have it happen again at the next intersection.  It took a lot of coaxing to get it to start, but eventually it was happy .. even if I wasn’t … and off we went.  Water in the works or something.

We got to the Pinnacles just before lunchtime and had a good walk/drive around this magical place.  It’s really quite odd, but the photos just don’t do it justice.  There’s just so many of them … even more pinnacles than gnomes in gnomesville.

Next stop was the Stromatolites, just a little way down the road.  We again timed it well with the weather.  There was a shower on the drive in, sunshine while we did the lap of the lake (and found two geocaches … one was the smallest I’d ever seen.  It was about the size of a thimble, but still had a logbook rolled up inside it.) … but once we got back to the car and had lunch there was another brief storm.  We made good use of it though and put the frypan out in it to get a rinse and cool down.

These Stromatolites are about 50cm each across.

Then it was on to Geraldton.  We figured that we were there a bit early and pushed on a bit further to Coronation beach.

There’s a great free camp down by the beach itself.  There’s only 21 sites and we got the 2nd last one.  It took a bit of shoe horning … but the rig fits … just.  Really odd shaped sites in most cases.  Ours is T shaped.  You need to reverse in the van to one end of the T and then swing the car into the other end.  Then you’re stuck there …

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