Cleaverville, WA.

 Next stop for us is the Peedamulla Campground. We had originally booked 4 nights during our rush to plan this busy area, but soon realized that there is not much to do in this spot. We would have liked to go to Onslow for a day or 2 but we were restricted by our over-due car service. So we reduced our booking to 2 nights, but ended up staying just the one night. 

The campground itself was very nice. Nice and spacious sites, beautiful rocky views of the plains, and modern clean facilities with pretty native landscaping. The push button showers were a great idea to help save water.

We ran into Harriet and her family who we met at the Fingers Fingers Beach. They were staying at Peedamulla as well. The girls had a great time playing together again.

The next day we drove on to a free camp just south of Karratha called Miarree Pools. Our camp at Cleaverville is first in, best dressed to pick your campsite so we wanted to be a bit closer so we could get there early. And it gave us a chance to drive to Karratha and restock before heading to Cleaverville. We also visited Dampier, the home of Red Dog, looked at the gas plant and had an explore of the area, including the playground!!

Miaree Pools was a nice camp on the river and we had a fire and the kids enjoyed playing with some glow sticks before bed. 

We were up early and had our quickest pack up yet - on the road by 7.15am. The early morning paid off because as we were driving past one of the beach front camps, the previous people were leaving so we just drove straight in behind them and had a beautiful camp for the week. It was a beautiful spot to watch the sunrise as well.

On our way driving to Cleaverville, Zara's top front tooth fell out finally. She is making the toothfairy work hard to find her in all these different places.

Cleaverville was very peaceful and had a very entertaining beach. We didn't see the kids all that much during the day which was good. They were entertained by endless jellyfish which were made into jellyfish snitzels and jellyfish pie and then offered to fellow campers for a bargain deal of "10 bucks"! haha. A few people told us the jellyfish are still able to sting even when they are dead, but the kids weren't worried and never got stung. 

Elsie made lots of friends with all the people fishing on the beach in front of our camp and was always friendly and helping them with their bait. One family had 2 older teenage girls and gave Elsie and Zara some headbands that no longer fitter their girls.

The beautiful variety of stones on the beach kept them occupied , as well as making a new friend, Diesel, who was from Port Hedland and on school holidays with his grandparents. 

We also meet up with Harriet and her family travelling around Australia as well. They are originally from Hull in the UK and we had fun getting to know them, and learning together about the local ocean life - such as octopus and tropical crayfish.

We went fishing at the boat ramp one day and managed to catch some fish. They were Giant Herring and had a eating rating of 1/5. But we were willing to give it a go - the fish meat itself tasted nice, however there were a ridiculous number of bones - to the point where every mouthful had a handful of bones. We were also fighting seagulls for our fish, and were ambushed by sandflies! Our first real experience with sandflies and we all paid for the experience for the next week with itchy bites.

Kylie and Bridie had a day together in town at Karratha while the car was getting serviced at Toyota. Kylie had a much needed hair cut, visited the most expensive laundromat on the trip so far ($8/load), filled the drinking water containers up, groceries and a Kmart trip to buy things we had forgotten when we left. For example, more cool long sleeve tops for everywhere to prevent sandfly bites, reef shoes for fishing and yet another pair of thongs for Kylie as she has broken 2 pairs already on the trip.

We did a day trip to the town of Wickham and were pleasantly surprised by how pretty it was for a mining town. And of course posed for a family photo.

Point Samson is the town just over from Wickham and is basically just a caravan park and a pretty swimming beach called Honeymoon Cove.

On our last night we decided to be brave and try our luck at catching some octopus for dinner. We have watched other people doing it during the week and Kylie's dad had said they were good eating to we gave it a go. Diesel was very brave and just grabbed them with his hand, other people used long thongs, and others had home made octopus catching sticks made from an old fishing rod and a squid jig attached to the end. 

The rock pools where very interesting to explore. Pretty coral, little fish, lots of octopus that squirt water at your if your get to close, and the very pretty tropical cray fish.

We met a nice man on the rock pools and he was very good at catching them and helped us and taught us the best technique. I think he caught the majority of our dinner that night!! haha. The kids were very helpful in preparing them for dinner, including the kids new friend Harriet.