Esperance, Western Australia

This week, early on Monday morning, brother Graham and I started off on a drive to Esperance on the South coast of Western Australia where our sister lives. Esperance is around 720 kilometres from Perth and takes about 8 hours driving at the speed limit of 120kph with a couple of breaks. We decided to overnight at Lake King.
There is a lake at Lake King, albeit dry. There is also a motel....and that is about it!
Neither of us slept well...Graham suffers from heat and I suffer from the cold. He spent the night throwing off the doona and I spent the night wrapped up to keep warm.
We arrived in Esperance and moved into separate rooms at sister Shirley’s house.

This was not just a social visit, but I had brought with me a couple of computers to replace a previous machine which had died. I managed, after a lot of mucking around and talking with a help desk in the Phillipines, to get a connection and set up a freeby email client; Yahoo Mail. The Skype camera she had bought was not compatible with Macs, so I have suggested she sell it locally and once she has become familiar with using Skype, then buy a camera which is Mac compatible. Not sure that this will eventuate as Shirl is a bit timid when it comes to computers.

Esperance has a population of about 15,000 and magnificent beaches and outlying islands. Being so far south I imagine the water would be too cold for Kev. About 15 kilometers out of town is a large wind farm of about 15 turbines. It supplies about 22% of Esperance’s power consumption. Esperance has plenty of wind and most of the surrounding farms have large New Zealand style windrows of gum trees to break up the howling winds.

On Wednesday evening we dined out at a nice restaurant with the rest of Shirl’s family; Karen, her lovely daughter and the grandkids. A nice meal and good to catch up with them after so long. I don’t think I will visit Esperance again unless there is a funeral to attend....more like they will attend mine.

We did the drive back in 8 hours with us driving 200 kilomters each and making a couple of food stops. Graham’s new Volkswagen Passat was a pleasure to drive and when overtaking road trains went like a ‘shower of s***’. First time I have driven a turbocharged car and I was suitably impressed. The Passat has lots of interesting technological tricks, but is a bit bossy....it won’t let you do anything until the driver’s seatbelt is attached. Not sure how that is overcome in those states of the U.S. where the civil liberties of the citizenry allow them to drive without a seatbelt??

Nice to be home in familiar surrounds and with my own comfortable bed!

Yesterday I drove to the young Cambodian mum’s new retreat and replaced a MacBook laptop with Joan’s PC laptop. After giving her the Macbook a week ago she went out and bought a PC modem and Skype camera. It was easier to give Joan’s PC that trying to return and change the camera and modem. She is a lovely young lady and her joy at being helped is ample reward for me.