Day 4

Day four dawned on us in WA. We set off early to the nearest petrol station and it was closed. Eventually we (gulp) bought petrol of another brand and headed off towards Esperance. Slowly the landscape reverted from Mad-Max's-alien-planet to your standard wheat belt farmland. The wheat crop was in, evidenced by massive mounds of wheat under tarpaulins by the side of the road. I guess we drove past a substantial portion of the world's wheat crop.

A full investigation reveals that someone has taken the wheat off all these sticks. The nerve.

I've always been curious about Esperance, since reading Art Linkletter's book which gave the impression that it was his idea to irrigate the area and turn it from a desert into a sheep haven. Esperance turned out to be a pretty standard southern Australian seaside town, with pine trees lining the beach and bad coffee. One lap was enough and we headed on to Albany.

We skipped by all the beaches between Esperance and Albany, which is a crying shame because I'm sure every inch of this coast is absolutely fantastic. Time was limited because Steve was due back to work in a week and a half and we were most of a continent away from his office in Collins Street, and still heading west. Sigh.

The coastline around Albany is hugely rugged and scenic, and they elected to build the town in the least interesting part. I'm guessing the weather had something to do with it, because the town is hiding behind a headland, and everything that isn't looks like it has been blasted flat by arctic winds and salt spray. Steve pointed out 'dog rock' in town, which apparently looks like a dog from an angle that was just a tad too uninteresting to figure out - I took it for granted. It was kind of cute to see someone had painted a collar on it.

We located our motel and drove up to the lookout on Mount Clarence which made it easy to imagine how the place operated in its whaling heyday. Driving about at random led us to Emu Point, which looks like a cool-climate version of a Florida retirement village. Very pleasant, in a retirement at the end of the world kind of way. There's even a golf course.

Down in the port we found a Mexican (I'm not kidding) restaurant. The largely gluten-free menu was appreciated by Steve, who had been subsisting on chips and Brown's coffee ambrosia since the schmackerel supply had dwindled to tuna.