It was quite a detour to go to Hyden, the home of Wave Rock, instead of straight to Esperance. However the kids were keen to see it (it was in the book ‘Are we there yet?’), and Michael and I wanted to see it too. So we made the nearly 350km trek north east to Hyden. We’re getting used to long drives, so it didn’t seem too bad. We drove through some nice scenery when passing through the Stirling Ranges NP. We passed through some wheatbelt country too. We arrived at Hyden around 4pm. Because it was a Sunday, virtually everything was shut. We made our way 6km out of town to where the caravan park was situated right at the base of the rock. We checked in and were setup by 5pm. Since it was only 200m to the base of the rock, I asked if any of the children wanted to walk there that afternoon. All except Lauren did. Lauren and Michael were tired and said they would wait until tomorrow to see it. So I took the others – it was even closer than I had expected, and we were the only ones looking at it at that time – Sam remarked on how different this was to our Uluru experience.

The next day, we packed up the van and drove out of the van park and parked in the carpark area nearby. Then we walked to wave rock again and all had fun doing the usual surfing poses on the rock. We then did the walk up above the rock. Then we did the 600m walk to another rock formation called Hippo’s Yawn. When you see the rock, you can understand the name. The kids had fun here too, pretending to climb into the Hippo’s mouth, and Sam climbed up on top of his nostril! As well as seeing these rock formations, we saw lots of ‘dragons’ – of the lizard variety. They seemed to be everywhere and had such a funny way of scurrying along. We had fun spotting them.

We then returned to the van and had hotdogs for lunch (using the generator to heat them up in the microwave). It was about 12.30 then when we started driving again, heading south-east towards Esperance, back on the coast. Esperance was about 400km away, and we weren’t planning to try to get there tonight, but planned to drive as far as we felt comfortable to and then stop at a free camping spot overnight.

We drove nonstop until about 3.30 when we reached Ravensthorpe. We stopped here for some afternoon tea and a play at the playground. We decided to drive a further 80km to a free camping spot at Monjingup. This was a nice enough spot. The kids had a bike ride and a play while I got some dinner. Then it was off to bed.