helluva road trip!

i absolutely love the 'sark' books. those who have read or know them might understand a little more what i mean when i talk about the 'succulent wild woman' road trip i did with my friend carrie back in december. carrie squeezed in this trip to perth between the end of semester and christmas so that she could revisit her old stomping ground of perth, and of course... me! we had a great time exploring around our neighborhood - the uwa campus, where carrie spent a semester during college. we revisited old hangouts and carrie kept remarking how the sounds, smells and sights would bring floods of memories back (all good ones, i think). since carrie had spent quite a bit of time already in perth, we decided to pack up the x-trail only a day after her arrival and head north. we had a rough 'itinerary' of what we thought would be "reasonable" distances to drive in one day, but we also thought we'd just see how we wanted to break it up as we got going. in total, we ended up covering about 1700 miles over the week.

Day 1: Perth to Kalbarri Nat'l Park
on our way out of perth, we made a few stops on our supply list. first, we hit up a liquor store for the essential boxed wine - which no camping trip i ever do in the future will ever be without! we then found a very helpful camping store for the purchase of an air mattress pump, a couple of highback camp chairs (which were really the lap of luxury), and a map (yeah, probably didn't wanna go much further w/out one of these). we got a big kick out of the camp store owner, who was dressed exactly like steve irwin, and was so enthusiastic about camping, he probably would have joined us if we had asked him to. actually i think he was a bit shocked at our laid back nature regarding our trip, b/c he honestly looked a bit concerned after he asked us when we were planning on going on this trip and we boldly replied "right now!"

next stop: Dongara - a really sleepy, quaint little town on the coast that was impossible to drive straight through. we filled up gas at this old-fashioned place where two cute ladies came out and pump the gas (or petrol, as they say here) for us.

because there were so many distances with very few towns in between, it was quite welcoming to finally come into one. in fact, they have such a problem with drivers falling asleep at the wheel, many places offer "free coffee for the driver", which is always listed clearly on a sign upon entering town. we took full advantage of this, although the "coffee" at the roadhouses was typically a jar of powdered instant coffee, a jug of hot water and styrofoam cups. it still does the job! after using one of these coffee stops to demonstrate to carrie the delicious 'tim tam slam' - a chocolate cookie dipped in coffee - we pulled off the main road to make our last leg of that day's trip in to kalbarri. we were giddy with girly joy when we had the pleasure of driving past the "pink lake" - a natural phenomenon!

we pulled into the town of kalbarri at about sunset, which we learned was about the latest one can pull in and still try to find a campsite at the caravan parks. we were lucky to get a spot, and even luckier to get our tent up in the massive winds (we didn't even attempt the rainfly, just the bare see-through tent part). a sweet old couple saw us struggling to prevent our tent from flying away and provided some useful rope to tie the tent to a fence/tree. yeah, it was that windy. by the time all this was done, we had to resort to crackers and hummus for dinner, accompanied by some very fine boxed red wine. ahhhhh, the fun was only beginning!