Camping

Last Friday was a public holiday seeing as CHOGM was on in Perth, so instead of having breakfast with the Queen, we decided to go for a bit of a drive and go camping overnight. I've been saying to Rod for a while that I'd like to go out to Toodyay (which is about 1.5hours north-east of here) while the weather is still cool and hopefully everything is still a bit green and the Avon river is flowing. So that's what we did. We have a book with a few different 4WD day trips out of Perth in it, and one of the trips was out this way too, so we decided to follow the directions in the book and see where it took us :-)

All packed and ready to go

having lunch along the Avon River

We then did some more driving around and checked out some of the campsites. They were all pretty full and not really what we expected, so we ended up back tracking and finding a campsite on the other side of the river where only one other couple were camped. It had a drop dunny, a fire pit and a picnic table which was just right.Miss Olivia enjoying the fire and Devon running to his chair so
he doesn't miss out on being in the photo!

dinner time

roasting marshmallows

Devon was only interested in playing in the car with his torch

So maybe you're wondering where we all slept and how the kids went at night. Well...we had already told Olivia and Devon a few days before we went that we'd go camping and they would be sleeping in the car. Olivia thought that'd be great of course but Devon wasn't too sure about it. He kept saying that we should take the camper and coming up with all sorts of reasons, like "Camper got beds in it" and "Camper got table and chairs". Anyway, we weren't going to take the camper and he'd just have to sleep in the car. So come bed time, he has his sleeping area all set up next to the fridge there and we had Olivia on the backseat, which you can fold down. She was well and truly ready to sleep but Devon was just so wired and would not settle down. He kept switching on the interior light and playing with his torch, sitting up and doing all sorts of stuff. After a few good telling offs and smacks he still wasn't calming down or showing any signs of sleeping so we ended up taking the fridge out, putting the cargo barrier down and putting the kids next to each other so that I could lie with them and hopefully get Devon to calm down and sleep. Hahaha like fun! Anyway, after ignoring him for a bit while he climbed all through the car, then holding him on my lap by the fire and being told "I not love you!", then lying next to him again, he finally crashed around 9:45pm, holding his precious torch and we (thankfully) didn't hear him or Olivia till 6 the next morning :-)
Rod and I slept in our swags under the stars by the way.

mmm, bacon and eggs for breakfast!

our campsite with the dunny in the background

these bright blue flowers are all through the bush - very pretty!

having some morning smoko in Toodyay

Rod was watching this guy trying to get his car started for a while and in the end he thought he better see if he needed a hand. Turns out the guy was a medic (he'd saved someone's life already that morning) and the car was his mates and he actually didn't have a clue what to do to get it going! After a jump start it was all good again.

From Toodyay we drove down through Northam and then to York where
we checked out the car museum. Lots of old and interesting cars in there!

Isn't this one just the right size for Devon?

some very old cars

Hey! A corolla like I used to drive!

A photo from Olivia - she thought these were pretty cool telephone boxes