Albany (to Hyden-Wave Rock) to Ravensthorpe (Tuesday 8th June 2010)

Travel day.

Albany to Hyden 347km. Hyden to Ravensthorpe 194km.

Up at 6.15am. No rain overnight so everything was nice and dry. Packed up quickly because looking at the sky it could rain any minute. Just finished packing up camp trailer and it started drizzling! On the road 8.20am

Bye-bye Albany. Hello Hyden. We took the back roads to Hyden. It's wheat farming country out here and there are silo's and wheat storage shed's everywhere. And next to every silo is a train track that zig zag's over the main road a million times. We spent loads of time slowing down and looking out for trains.

Drove passed a wooden carved sign that said "Hukuna Matata". I just love the sights we've come across in our travels. They come up in the most unexpected places. We arrived at Hyden and had lunch. Some locals had hand welded icon features of the past. They were really good.

We drove down the road and after a short walk from the carpark, there was Wave Rock. It was BIG. We all had a turn 'surfing' the rock, looking like idiots but having fun.

After 'surfing' we took a walk to Hippo's Yawn and then left at around 3.30pm headed for Lake King.

We got to Lake King Caravan Park and took one look and decided to keep going. The park was pretty much a paddock with not much else. The park works by an honesty system where you just put your money in the envelope and into the box so we weren't gonna offend anyone by leaving. It was 5 o'clock and normally we wouldn't drive in the dark but we pressed on until we reached Ravensthorpe. We drove into the one and only caravan park in town and on seeing 6 old dunnies in a row that had been turned into garden pots with weeds (maybe they were flowers), growing out of them we thought "Oh shit", (pardon the pun) maybe we should have stayed at Lake King! Pete came out of the shipping container/office and proceeded to tell me "The old duck was pretty rough. She was covered head to toe in tatts". Oh great! I was thinking. Somebody please get me out of here. Well all I could say was thank God it was dark and I could barley see a thing. It was for the best.