YoungNomads: York to Geraldton

Hello from the West!

We called into York a really nice little town and were lucky enough to score a free park for the van (with power) which was great!! The town was full of historic buildings, it was the first inland town in WA. We went for a morning walk up to the lookout and then to the market!

Always up for a good cause!!

Wow you see all sorts of vehicles on the road - we had to pull over for a about 10mins waiting for this big machine and a couple of others to drive by....

Much to our freakedoutness we noticed when we were leaving York that warning lights on the Jeep's instrument panel came on, first one then another!! OMG we are towing this big van and the car looks like its in trouble.... we had booked into a Perth dealer for a service and we really thought that we should hightail it straight to Perth (we actually did want to explore more around Northam) and hold our breaths and hope like crazy we made it.... lets face it who wants to be stranded on the side of a road with a caravan?? We struggled through the ranges to get to 60kph, its seems like the Jeep goes into protective mode and cuts the power, we were so freaked.... thank goodness we did make it!!

We had booked into to a caravan park on the north side of Perth which happened to be right next to this amazing park which we walked around the very next morning. We also decided to put up the annex for the first time which went well! Geoff discovered that there were markets near by (only a 2km walk he said).... almost 4 kms later we reached the market where we were rewarded with being able to buy some great fresh produce and had a great coffee, guess who carried our purchases all the way back? :-)

We decided that we would hop on our bikes and head to the coast on the Monday public holiday in Perth. What a great ride is was, we arrived at Hilary's which is sort of like a Fremantle of the north... the marina looked nice and after we'd taken a look around we decide to partake in a cider!

We picked up the Jeep all fixed apparently.... honestly its such a frustrating thing, it was discovered that the work Adrian Brian did to the Jeep before we left was completely bogus, they did a botch up job!!! DO NOT EVER DO BUSINESS WITH ADRIAN BRIAN!!!!!

Geoff finally found a solution to transporting our bikes!

Finally we left Perth after 5 days and headed north bound to Cervantes - what an absolutely lovely little place, and to make things better it was 27 degrees when we arrived, it is the place you stay when you are visiting the Pinnacles. We did try on THREE different occasions to fish but with no luck... although Geoff did catch a 2cm puffer fish!! :-)

The Pinnacles was quite an amazing place, quite different to what we'd expected, it was 400ha of these pointy things emerging from the ground.... scientists and geologists are still not sure to this day about how they were created. But they were pretty amazing, sort of like being on the moon I think :-)

There are also some lovely places near by that we visited including the "suspect" jetty, the Stomalites, Thirsty Point and the lobster factory

We decided that we'd buy direct from the Lobster factory and make our own dinner.... Yummy!!

We left Cervantes and headed towards Geraldton via Dongara. We decided to stay at Sunset Beach north of Geraldton for a couple of days, the weather was looking rather average so thought best to stay put. First night we decided to cook up our prawns that we'd got from Cervantes, yum yum yum!