We started off the day by setting off the smoke alarm in our cabin. In our defence I must say that the kitchen set up made it impossible to put the fry pan under the exhaust fan and the frypan was always destined to be smoky. We heard at least 3 other cabins do the same. Luckily it was not early in the morning when I did it.
Our niece Dani was home for the morning so we spent a couple of hours catching up with her and even checked out her little veggie garden that Geoff set up for her. We’ve got carrots, bok choy, broccoli, lettuce, baby spinach and snow peas to take on home with us. Yum. It was great to see her and share a cuppa.
Our next stop was Murphy’s Haystacks. We have seen distant views of these many times as we drove past on the Eyre Highway near Elliston, but you can now pay $2 and walk in and around them. The farmer even has a toilet there and sells honey. It was great to get up close to these unusual inselbergs (Insel=Island, Berg=mountain) finally.
We were really lucky to catch the landowner doing a check visit and had a good chat. A lovely bloke who was happy to spend a few minutes just shooting the breeze with us.
We stopped in briefly at Port Kenny and admired their jetty.
Then headed on to Venus Bay. We parked looking out at the boats and the bay while we ate our sandwiches and got closely acquainted with some of the locals.
There was a bloke here working on his amazing cut stone wall. He has cut the local rock to build an amazing dry stone wall around his place with some dolphin sculptures set in to it and was working away in the cool breeze. It will be worth diverting past his place again and checking out the completed project when it is done. Laborious work.
Then we headed down the coast toward Talia Caves. We’ve been blown away by the action of the sea many times on this trip (and by the ability of even fresh water to sculpt rock) and this was no exception. The waves crashing in have sculpted huge cave areas at both Woolshed Caves and The Tub. The wind was savage but it was worth braving it to take the stairs down to water level to get a closer view at Woolshed.
A little further on is a very fancy memorial to Sister Millard- who drowned here. Even the marble stone of this is eroding badly from the elements.
We resisted the urge to take the track through the Lake Newland Conservation Park and backtracked, checking out the rocky camping area nestled in behind the Sandhills near Woolshed Cave. This was originally where we thought we would be camping the night before.
We travelled onwards, taking the route suggested by the friendly farmer at Murphy’s Haystacks. The Mount Wedge to Kyancutta road took us out to the main highway, where we tootled along for a while, but turned back towards the coast and turned in to Cows Head camp in the Caralue Bluff Conservation Park, finding ourselves a nice spot nestled between the trees beneath the rocky bluff. The wind was chilly but died away after a while so we were able to enjoy one last small campfire – heating our curry and boiling the billy on the coals instead of hooking up the gas bottle.
Luvapuzzle 