Port Lincoln

                                      The view of Port Lincoln from a lookout.

                                        Steve and Liam squid fishing one evening.

 4 squid were caught. Liam caught the biggest one. We enjoyed eating it for dinner the following night.

 The next morning Liam and Steve went fishing and Liam caught 4 King George Whiting. Steve must be Liam's good luck charm. We cooked them up to have with the squid caught the night before. We all enjoyed the crumbed calamari but the boys and I found the whiting had too many small bones and we gave our serve to Steve who had a feast of whiting.

 We drove to Port Lincoln National Park and enjoyed a game of beach cricket at September beach with Ella's family. It was a lovely beach with shallow, clear water.

                                 Liam loved hitting the ball for six into the water.
                                                                              Ben with Ella having a ball at the beach. Ella reminded us of the boys cousin Amelie. She had the same colour hair and eyes and olive skin. She even had a similar vibrant personality but she is slightly older being 2 months older than Ben. They became very good friends and they were both very sad when they had to say goodbye.

 The next day we went on a boat to feed the tuna. You could choose to swim with the tuna too but we all didn't fancy the idea of being in the water with fish that are so big they can weigh about 60kgs and the average weight is 34kgs. We were all excited about seeing them and feeding them.

 We fed the tuna pilchards whilst wearing a mesh glove as the tuna have sharp teeth and they can't tell where the pilchard finishes and fingers begin. The tuna would swim very fast and come from under the platform we were kneeling on.

 In a separate enclosure they had queen snapper, red and pink snapper, salmon, skippy, sweep, yellow tail,  port jackson sharks and gummy sharks. We didn't need the glove to feed these fish and the sharks were very small and stayed down the bottom.

 On the fish feeding pontoon they had a small touch pool with sea stars, sea urchins, a baby port jackson shark, squid, herring, abalone, and scallops. The boys enjoyed holding many of them and even patted the baby shark when the man held it.

 On the pontoon they had an under water observatory to see all the fish up close. We were amazed to see the tuna up close and see how big and fast they swam. We could also see all the fish from the enclosure with the snapper and other fish.

Streaky Bay

                                            The views around Streaky Bay.

 We met this friendly white pointer shark at the local Shell servo. It was in the book we brought with us called "Are we there yet?" about a family that travels around Australia so we just had to take photos with it.

 The caravan park was on the foreshore. We had a site right next to my Dad and Daph.

                       Dad and Daphne next to their Eco Tourer caravan.

 We enjoyed our last night at Streaky Bay at the local pub which had nice food and a great view.

 Ben with his girlfriend Ella who was traveling with her 2 brothers and parents for over a year. We met them at Kalgoorlie and kept bumping into them across the Nullarbor, Streaky Bay then Port Lincoln. Her eldest brother, Riley, became good friends with Jake as they were similar ages and her youngest brother, Cooper, who was 4 yrs old wanted Liam to play with him. It was sad for all when they took off on a different route to us.

 When we left SB we headed to Murphy's Haystacks which is on the way to Port Lincoln. It was also in the book so we made sure we went there. They are interesting rock formations which were thought to be a good omen for growing good hay in the fields surrounding it which belonged to Mr Murphy.

We had  a very relaxing week at SB, enjoyed spending time with Dad and Daphne and headed down to Port Lincoln for the final stretch of our trip.
Sue.

Kalgoorlie and the Nullarbor

 We found Kalgoorlie very interesting. The boys loved all the huge diggers and trucks. Below is called the Super Pit which is a massive open cut gold mine.

 We decided this tray from an old dump truck would make a great swimming pool if we dug a hole in the backyard for it. It would take a lot of water to fill. We must have been feeling the heat. It was mid 30's on this day.

       The truck has a dwarfing effect on our kids. Don't they look tiny?

                  Ben isn't even as tall as the width of the tyres used on the trucks.

 Liam and Jake trying their hand at drilling in the underground gold mine. (only pretending) The drillers earn $100 per hour so we considered sending them off to work for the day.

 We watched a gold pouring demonstration and handed around the end result. What a shame we didn't have a pocket big enough to slip this into. I've forgotten how much he said this was worth but he handed around an ounce of gold at the start which was the size of a pile of about 4x 10c coins and that was worth about $1,700. We all tried panning for gold and Liam found a couple of specks.

 We drove from Kalgoorlie WA to Streaky Bay SA in 3 big days of driving. The boys are such seasoned travellers that there were no complaints or "Are we there yet?" On the first day they complained that we had reached our destination as they wanted to watch another DVD. There was a thunderstorm on the last night at Kalgoorlie that followed us all the way across the Nullarbor. When we got to the Bunda Cliffs and the head of bite it was raining so hard and so cloudy that there was no point in pulling over for the views.
The above photo is us at the end of the longest straight stretch of road in Australia-146.6kms. It luckily stopped raining long enough to take the photo.

 We stayed the second night at the Nullarbor Roadhouse which had one of the many golf holes right next to where we camped. We met a few people on our travels who were playing golf across the Nullarbor. There are holes in Esperance, Kalgoorlie and all the way across the Nullarbor. The one above, and I assume the rest would be the same, was dirt with some fake grass for the green.

 Sign at Nullarbor Roadhouse. We didn't see any camels or wombats but we saw many kangaroos. Most of them were the dead variety on the side of the road. One was sitting in the middle of our side of the road watching us driving towards it. I alerted Steve as I was not sure if he had noticed (he was in a trance driving the brain numbingly boring road) and he had to slow down to about 20km/h and beep the horn to get the silly roo to move. Talk about no road sense. No wonder there are so many dead ones on the side of the road.

 The storm front arriving at Nullarbor Roadhouse. One tourist had parked his hired plane next to the camping area and tied it down to the ground which we thought was a good idea. He was on his way from Adelaide to the Pilbara Region WA.

We were very happy to arrive safe and sound to Streaky Bay SA. The caravan park is right on the foreshore and we are camping right next to my Dad and Daph who have joined us for a holiday for a week. We have enjoyed our relaxing week at Streaky and will move onto Port Lincoln tomorrow and Dad and Daph will start their journey back home. More about Streaky Bay in our next blog....
Sue.