Ravensthorpe

Russ and I left Cranbrook on Tuesday morning after 5 nights there. It was quiet, but we enjoyed that a lot. What we didn’t enjoy was the bitter cold wind and rain-we found it almost impossible to get warm on a couple of nights even though we rugged up in long pants, jumpers, socks, slippers and put the heater on.

On the Monday, we took a drive out through the Stirlings again, then on to the very different Porongorup Ranges and home through Mt Barker. The Porongorups were much lusher than the Stirlings with Karri trees and creepers through the undergrowth.


It was nice to drive to Mt Barker and see the pastures looking so good. I lost my sunglasses somewhere in the Porongorups so was pleased to find a pair I liked in town. We saw lots of shingle back lizards, racehorse goannas and a snake on the road as we drove around-they must like the heat of the sealed roads.



Tuesday we drove to Ravensthorpe and booked into the caravan park for two nights intending to head to Salmon gums or Fraser Range Sheep Station Caravan Park on Thursday. The guy in the office was very friendly and immediately suggested a couple of drives we could do-one out through the Ravensthorpe Ranges and the other through Fitzgerald NP to Houptoun. We’d have had to do the first really quickly that night and the second the following day. We quickly decided to stay an extra day. Then Russ realized we’d be somewhere on the Nullabor when the AFL grand final was played, so we decided to stay on another two days-so our two nights is now 5.



I am enjoying it here although the park is odd. The female half of the pair running the place is a keen gardener and has lots of broken toilets, old stoves, boots , toilet pans (remember them), teapots, wheel barrows etc. etc. etc. filled with flowers and plants and scattered throughout the garden beds. The toilet blocks are crowded with live plants, home made mobiles, old stuff hanging on walls etc etc etc. All this stuff has seen much better days and must have been picked up at the tip. She has one garden bed called “Barbie is a slut” and it’s full of Barbies and Kens doing very rude things!!! She has painted murals on the office walls, toilet blocks and laundry and she is THE most heavily tattooed woman I’ve ever seen. Plus she looks like she did too many drugs in the 70s. But she’s really friendly and loaned us lots of books on local wild flowers to take on our first drive today.



The Ravensthorpe Ranges were beautiful, a real surprise with their huge variety of flowers and shrubs. We drove up a dirt track to a couple of lookouts (over the NP and out to sea) then down and back into town and couldn’t get over all we had seen. The only pity was that the wind was blowing so hard it actually spooked me at the first lookout. It was howling though the guy wires of the radio mast and the car doors were in danger of being ripped off as we opened them!




Tomorrow we are off to the NP if it doesn’t rain tonight. We are expecting 20mls and that will cause the dirt roads to be closed in the park