We had booked our car in for a regular service today (Tues), so we planned to have a rest day, mainly staying around the van park. This was good after the last few busy days. Lauren, especially, was very thankful for a chance to sleep in. The other 3 kids were awake early as usual, and so was I. Michael would have liked a sleepin, but wanted to get the car to the mechanic early, so that it would be ready earlier. The mechanic opened at 7am. He left the van park around 7, dropped the car off and had one of the workers drop him back to the van park (Kununurra is not that big, so it was not a problem to drop people anywhere).

I decided the kids should do some schoolwork today (inward groans from Mum and Dad and outward groans from the kids). I started this with the 3 who were awake while Michael was gone. Michael helped a bit when he got back, and then Michael and Sam walked into town to do some grocery shopping, as we were very depleted on our food stores. They got just the priority grocery items as they had to walk back with them. We decided we would do a bigger shop in the afternoon when we had the car again. We continued with schoolwork for most of the morning ( it took some of the children longer than it should have). They had ‘recess’ on the playground near our caravan. Then they had a short swim as a reward once they were finished. We then had some nachos for lunch – yum. Everyone had a rest time after lunch, reading books or listening to books and watching a short movie. Then Michael and I decided we should do some planning for our trip into the Bungle Bungles the next 2 days. We had briefly discussed it when we first arrived at Kununurra and had planned out the things we were going to do on different days. We knew we couldn’t take the caravan on the 4WD track into the Purnululu NP, so it was either go in and out in one day, or stay overnight in something other than the caravan. There is a camp area with safari-style tents already setup, but when we looked into this, it was going to be hideously expensive. We had brought one of our 3man tents with us. We thought maybe we could buy another inexpensive one, and just take the 2 tents in. Then Lauren and Sam said they would be happy to sleep in the back of the car, and we decided Hannah and Beth would fit in the tent with Michael and I. So we decided to take this approach.

I spent a half hour or so working out what we would need in the way of food for the day and a bit in the Bungle Bungles and then the next couple of days before we reached Derby. Then I dropped Michael and the kids off at the swim beach area at Lake Kununurra, and went and did the shopping. I picked them up after they’d had a nice swim and we all went back to the van park for showers, unpacking groceries and cooking dinner – hamburgers. The kids were a great help with all this. We had dinner and got the kids to bed, then I started to read up on the walks to do at the Bungle Bungles and started to write a list of all the things we’d need to pack in the car to take in with us. It was a bit more last minute planning than I usually do for this sort of thing, but since we’d been travelling for about 10 weeks now, I thought the kids were getting pretty good at being flexible if I’d forgotten anything – and it wasn’t like there would be no-one else in there. I packed as much of the food as I could that night and had the list ready to pack the remainder of things in the morning. We were hoping to leave the van park by 8am, so it was going to be another early start.