Friday 3rd March

A slow start today and why not, we ask ourselves?    We drove out to Dolphin Bay for a quick look to see if it was worth going fishing but the tide was going out so that was that.    Poor Pat has been complaining about her hip, the fact that she is actually complaining means that it is bad.    We decided to drive up to Condinup (50ks to get a phone signal) so that we can ring chiropractors in Espereance.    Not much luck but one is out for lunch so we decide to wait in the pub until he comes back.    The cappuccino was really nice (remember this is a pub in the middle of nowhere), so we decide to order a couple of salads.    Pat asked for a small one and got what she asked for, I asked for a medium sized one and a small bowl of chips.   The salad was enormous, beautifully presented and all very fresh but bloody huge.   I’m glad I ordered a small plate of chips, god knows what a large one would have been like.    All very nice!    Unfortunately none of the chiros could see Pat and as it’s a long weekend she has to wait until next week.

On returning to Thomas River we had a cup of tea and started on some mods to the stone guard on the caravan.    I went for a walk before wine o’clock, I walked a couple of ks up the beach and apart from a 4×4 returning from a fishing trip I saw not another soul, it was really nice, with a breeze coming off the sea and pure white squeaky sand.   Makes you glad to be alive.

Saturday 4th March

Decided on an exploring day today.    We’re in the Cape Arid National Park at Thomas river (in the bottom left corner of the map) and we thought we’d take a run up to Mt Ragged.    As you can see it looks pretty straightforward, emphasis on the ‘straight’ even!   However, this is a little used track and we expected it to be pretty rough, it actually continues past Mt Ragged and eventually ends up at Balladonia on the Eyre Hwy, (the road that crosses the Nullabor).    Initially the track looked very sandy and we were travelling very carefully until we came across some water stretching across the track some ten metres long.    Unlike the flooding on the road to Ravensthorpe this was sand under the surface and there was no way we were going into that.     While I was letting some more air out of the tires Pat discovered that there was a parallel track to left of the one we were on.    Obviously due to the state of the original track they had put a grader through at some time and created this parallel track.    We had to do a bit of bushbashing to get up onto it but compared to the old way this was a motorway (bush track standards that is!)

We carried on and Mt Ragged got closer and closer and eventually we arrived at the foot of the ‘mountain’, yeah, I know, 585 m is a small hillock really but for hereabouts it’s quite a big one.

        

We tried to take a ‘swlfie’ with Mt Ragged behind us but we could absolutely nothing on the screen in the bright sunlight and that’s exactly what we got pictures of!!   So reverted to the old method of setting the camera on a timer!

The trip back was pretty uneventful but we’d enjoyed a bit of exploring and the Ranger was grateful for our ‘track report’.    About a 150 ks there and back, 3.5 hours, doesn’t seem far but it’s still quite a remote track.

A walk  on the beach uses up the rest of the daylight, time for a glass of wine before dinner.