Day 17 Yallingup to Augusta

You know sometimes you shouldn’t let your guard down. The weather has been less than friendly over the last week with gale force winds, rain, more rain and more wind. I thought last night (for a fleeting moment) that it had passed. It hadn’t, over night rain belted down and the wind blew. In between the wind and the rain we managed to pack albeit the tents were still saturated. We pulled out about 10ish with our first stop Gabrielle’s Chocolates. This was only about 20 km’s down the road so not a long first leg. We only had about 90kms to do today anyway so it was never going to be a long day. The wild weather has created a bit of a mess with lots of debris, branches etc all over the roads. We slowed our pace a bit due to the winds and the uncertainty of what might be around the corner. The debris on the road wasn’t so much dangerous more a nuisance with the possibility it would damage something. I made the comment to Di about this after we went over a particularly large branch and it bounced around under the car which concerned Di. The omen was to come true but more on that later. The choc master at Gabriel’s was very knowledgeable on chocolate which you would expect him to be. It was interesting how the flavours change subtly with the different beans even when making the same product.  Gabriel’s under our belt (cause you can never have too much chocolate) we continued south to the Lake Cave. 

Cavern down to the entrance to the entrance of Lake Cave

Straw stalactites

There are a multitude of caves in these parts so we picked one. It’s well serviced and has a great information/reception area and the deck overlooking the cave entrance is quite spectacular. I have elected not to do the cave as there are over 300 steps and the way my back and knee have been going I would have put a sizable bet on me not making the first landing. Di and the rest of our intrepid travellers, however, did go down. The summary of accounts would indicate it was spectacular and thanks to Laura for acting as my photographer. From there it was straight into Augusta and the Flinders Bay Caravan Park. This park is a council run park and is closed 3 months of the year. It had only been open a week when we arrived. It’s a nice surprise and appears to be well run, clean and has some great hedging around some sites. This has given us some reprieve from the winds and rain. After we had set up we just dagged around for the remainder of the day. As for the omen as we set up the new water pump in the van was going flat out but no water. We traced the problem to a broken drain tap on the water tank, some debris had obliviously bounced up and clobbered the drain tap and emptied our water tank. We fixed the problem in about 15 minutes between showers of rain. Thanks to Gaz for crawling under the van.