We set up and had an early lunch and read up on what to do in Esperance. The main tourist attractions seemed to be the national park about 50km east of Esperance, called Cape Le Grande NP, which had lots of beautiful beaches. We had read about Lucky Bay, which is said to have the whitest sand in Australia (not sure how they measure this). So we decided to go for a drive there after lunch.
We packed up some nibblies and a thermos and headed off. It was an easy half hour drive. We could see where the NP was as we approached it, due to the granite rocks protruding out of the earth. The first one we saw was called ‘Frenchman’s Peak’ and as we could see why from the shape. We visited 3 beaches while there – Thistle Cove, which we walked along and thought was beautiful, Lucky Bay, where we had a picnic for afternoon tea and drove along the sand and ‘splashed’ the car through the water, and then Le Grande Beach, which gave us sunset views back towards Esperance to the west. It was indeed some beautiful scenery.
We drove back to the van park and did the usual evening routine. We didn’t need to check out of this van park until 1pm, so we were going to do some grocery shopping in the morning and have a slow morning before heading to Kalgoorlie.
We had a sleep in next morning and did some clothes washing. Then I headed off for the shops. The town of Esperance itself was fairly uninteresting? Before going to Woolworths, I looked around at some knick-knack shops and second hand book shops – but didn’t find anything to buy. I headed back to the van and helped pack up. We had a quick lunch before heading off.
It was 380km to Kalgoorlie-Boulder. We rang ahead and booked into a van park – to our happy surprise they had a special for October where kids stayed free – this made a big difference in our family – often halving the price. We didn’t arrive until 5.45pm, and were glad we had booked ahead as they were then full. We had one of the frozen meals for dinner and had the usual bedtime routine.