Wednesday morning, and our latest and last road trip (at least in the southern hemisphere and in 2011) is about to begin. Let me paint the picture…

So we had been in Perth for a little over a week now, or maybe two, its very hard to tell time these days. We had planned on heading north or south or east from Perth on a road trip. Unfortunately Perth is very isolated in particular to the north, it would take a day of driving to get to the nearest place to stay I think. Up north is Shark Bay and Monkey Mia, world heritage listed areas, but between them and Perth is nothing but roads… that rules out going north. East is basically dessert and after a day you hit the "Do Not Enter" section of Australia so that rules that out. So south it is then. We have rented three cars to date, a Nissan Sunny, a Nissan Micra, and a Hyundai Getz. They have all served us well in getting from hostel to hostel, but its time for a change. It's time for going camping. Those of you who know Regina may appreciate the lengths I had to go through to convince her that this was a good idea, but she actually came around to the idea quite quickly. The budget came into consideration. $280 for a car and $400 for a campervan, the car includes a minimum of $50 a night on hostels, the campervan doesn't. So the road trip was planned. South to Margaret River and stopping in a few places on the way down. Six nights, and a grand total of about 1000km of driving, good plan!!!!

Right, that's the scene set anyway. Back to the day in hand, I was collecting the camper at 11 on the far side of Perth, the train in to town and back across the other side took me about an hour, got the van and drove back across via Fremantle to the house again… poor Regina thought I was lost. We loaded it up, forgetting the obvious things like a blanket, pillows, cups, ice for the cool box, not that they would be important. We set out our route on the map and off we went. It's a grand vehicle to drive, Mitsubishi something or other, powerful enough but with warning stickers on the dash not to exceed 80km/h our it will overheat, not that we are in a rush anyway!!! It is surprisingly easy to drive, just like a big fat car really, and I like the high driving position too. Anyway, I digress, we headed for Rockingham and bypassed it to stop off first in Mandurah. We took a walk around the town and got some info in the local Information Centre. They pointed us in the direction of Preston Beach where we could camp for free beside the national park. We walked around the town a bit and off we went back on the road again. We got to Preston Beach at about three or four and parked up, took a walk on the beach, had some dinner and settled in for the night. Camping is fun eh!!!! At about six or half six the neighbours popped over to say hello, or should I have said hopped over to say hello?!?!? About five of six kangaroos hopped out of the woods and over onto the grass beside us to eat their dinner. At about eight o'clock it was dark, we had gone to watch the sun set and get some pictures and since we were both very new to this campervanning thing we decided it best to go to sleep…. That's when it started to get cold….. since we had neglected to bring any blankets or sleeping bags or anything we put on all our clothes and did the best we could to get some sleep… anyone feeling sorry for us yet????

The next morning we got up at half six, with the sun, had some breakfast and off we went again. It was actually a grand sleep in the end. Pimped out builders vans aren't the worst place we have slept so far, no bugs for a start!! Next stop on down the road is Bunbury, a town with a few things to see, so once we had packed away everything we headed off. We might have stayed longer but there was a god awful smell of something very rotten in the air, nothing to do with us I assure you, possibly the dry lakes up the road, or the kangaroo droppings, it was rancid anyway so off we went…