Weekend Trip To York @ ExplorOz

Weekend Trip To York

Submitted: Tuesday, Jun 03, 2008 at 13:13

Took Friday off work to prepare for our first weekend away as visitors with the Land Cruiser Club of WA. Got the camper packed, fridge in the car by about 2 pm ready to head down and pick the kids up from school at 3 pm as we were heading straight up to York to meet with the group later Friday afternoon.

After a pleasant drive of only about 90 km we arrived at the York caravan park. We tend not to stay in caravan parks very often as we do prefer bush camping, but as the group on this weekend were staying there for a relaxing 3 days that’s what we were doing also.

Got the camper positioned and set up in about an hour, where we were met by Greg the trip leader on this one, and invited to join the others around the fire once we were organized. (Unusual to find a caravan park these days were you can actually have a camp fire)

After introductions all around (and both myself and Tracy are hopeless with names), we were fully included and made to feel very welcome. A few drinks later people headed off to get dinner prepared, which we had already done as we had the two kids who are always starving after school. We stayed by the fire, and over a period of time the rest of the group started making their way back.

With the entire group around the fire the conversation continued and we felt very comfortable with the people we had met. A couple of hours later after Greg had given us a hint as to our itinerary for the next day we all headed back to our camp sites for a well deserved sleep.

The weather predicted for the weekend was overcast and rain. It looked quite threatening on the Friday as we drove up, but we awoke to clear skies and sunshine on the Saturday morning. The group headed into the town of York for the morning to have a look around and get any last minute shopping or items that had been forgotten in the rush to leave on the Friday afternoon as well as to get together for morning tea.

We headed back to camp for lunch with the plan to meet up at 1 pm for a couple of hours drive. With all the vehicles lined up on the road outside of the caravan park we headed out in convoy for our afternoon drive. Just a quick drive pretty close to York itself, with some great scenery and plenty of opportunity for us to try our new video camera. We arrived back at camp around 4:30 pm to get ourselves spruced up for a pub meal that had been planned.

We headed to one of the local pubs at about 6:15 pm looking forward to our dinner and not having to cook at camp. After looking through the menu we all selected our meals and sat back chatting while we looked forward to some nice tucker. Out of the entire group 4 of us had ordered a chicken dish which looked beautiful as it arrived to the table. Our joy was not to last however. As we started into our meals 3 of us to our horror discovered that the chicken was not cooked properly and was totally raw in the middle. Not wishing to suffer food poisoning we contacted the waitress and informed her about this. She took the offending dishes back to the kitchen and came back to let us know that they had run out of chicken. As it was unlikely that any of us would have had another attempt at the chicken in any case, 1 ordered a schnitzel and 2 ordered steak. It was much better although mine was still overcooked. When it came time to pay the pub did do the right thing and gave us out meals for free. So for 2 adults and 2 kids our bill came to $29.00 so that was’t too bad, although it is unlikely that we would return there for another try.

After dinner we came out of the pub to rain, which was to continue all night at times very heavy, with thunder on occasions as well. We woke up in the morning and the rain had stopped, although everything did receive a good soaking. As we were the only ones with a camper (the others having vans on staying in on site vans) I was not really looking forward to packing up a wet camper. We met outside the caravan park ready for our mystery drive which was the purpose of the trip. We headed out in convoy for what was to be a nice easy country drive along some easy dirt roads. There is some amazing scenery around York which we had not seen in our previous travels, which is a definite advantage of travelling with a club who have done the research and reccy prior to the trip.

We did manage to get the vehicles a little bit dirty as there were a few small mud holes from the previous night’s heavy rain. All good fun, easy driving, nice stops for morning tea and lunch and a great day all around.

On the way back to the caravan park we stopped once again to top up for a quick stop with items forgotten, such as coffee (most important) and a bottle of red (even more important), then headed off on our own for an hour or so to continue testing and learning how to operate our new video camera.

Sunday night was spent once again around the camp fire, first for happy hour and then once everyone had finished dinner, for a pancake flipping competition. As ours were the only 2 kids on this trip, they were quite excited about this game (as were the adults). After trying to cook pancakes, rather unsuccessfully over the small fire pit, we managed to borrow a single burner gas cooker to continue. Each person had their turn at flipping, which isn’t too easy in the dark. Both the kids pancakes ended up not landing back in the pan, but it didn't’t seem to bother them at all, as they were quickly brushed off and eaten anyway. After coming a close second in the competition and the kids receiving chocolates as booby prizes, we all settled around the fire with a few drinks and a few camp fire games for the last night. As we headed off to bed for the night, all the clouds had cleared and we had a lovely star filled sky to fall to sleep to.

We awoke Monday morning, once again to overcast conditions as well as the coldest morning of the weekend. Packed up the camper ready to leave, and then headed off into York once again for morning tea before everyone left to return to Perth. After we all had our fill of scones, coffee and hot chocolate we headed back to the caravan park to collect our respective vans and campers, say goodbye and thank our trip leaders for a great weekend.

We decided to stay around York for a few more hours, including retracing some of our previous day’s route to capture some more shots for the video. We finally departed sometime around 3:30 for the drive back to Perth, stopping here and there along the way to capture some footage.

All in all it was a great weekend and our first trip with the Land Cruiser Club of WA (even though we have a Patrol). We shall definitely be doing further trips with this club. Tracy is now patiently editing over 2 ½ hours of video footage into something that may prove interesting to other people to have a look at, while I have the camper set up in the front yard, drying out before getting it poacked up for our next trip.

Some brief video footage here...... (please be aware that this is High Definition footage so even with ADSL you should let it buffer quite a bit before playing)