Chapter 17: Lucky Bay and the accumulation of power
On a trip like this, every 10 days to two weeks you need a maintenance day. Our arrival in the pretty seaside town of Esperance is this day. We dump all the grey and black water waste, refill with fresh water, wash and dry a ridiculous amount of clothes, top up the gas bottle, dispose of rubbish, buy more food.
It’s just like the holidays from when I was a kid. Except we also frantically charge electronic devices and download new episodes of our shows.
Internet and Electric Power. Having, acquiring, distributing and conserving both while on the road is a very new experience of camping for me.
Accessing the internet in Western Australia
In Australia, the national carrier is Telstra so it’s usually safe to assume that if you have a Telstra-connected mobile phone and there is mobile coverage, then you can connect to it.
Everywhere except Western Australia. Here, Optus (the second carrier, notorious throughout 2023 for collapsing the entire network and/or falling victim to data hacking. More than once.) has a lot of the rural coverage. That’s in the towns. The thing is that Western Australia is really really big. It is simply not feasible to have wired connectivity across such a large expanse of uninhabited space.
As city people, we forgot all of this until we got here. We thought we’d manage fine without the internet when we didn’t have it. And we did. But I guess we’re also learning that even though we don’t need it, it IS nice to have. Having internet access helped us work out where to buy a new coffee plunger quickly and easily. Just today it helped me work out when the shops in Esperance will close on the last trading day before Christmas (12 noon!!).
We’re not alone. People do not want to be without internet — even with really slow 1990s dial-up speeds — when camping. Now we are here, we realise everyone with any kind of mobile camping vehicle has their own StarLink connection.
StarLink is that satellite thing that allegedly deranged psycho Elon Musk invested in and takes credit for inventing. Fun fact: I once saw it moving through the night sky. I was on my way to the toilet early one morning while camping in a dark area and I saw this bright light herding dozens of smaller ones in a line underneath it. I’d never seen anything like it before, it was quite exciting until I found out about the whole Elon Musk connection.
Solar panels are king
I’m not sure when the idea of having electrical power at a campsite became mandatory. Did it coincide with the arrival of mobile phones? With the Grey Nomad revolution? When RVs started coming with TVs? When people started bringing a coffee machine camping with them? When camping moved from being living simply to relocating all the comforts of everything at home outside?
When T and I got together nearly 20 years ago, we did a lot of hiking and camping. We had to carry everything on our backs, so power was not a concern. Once the kids came along and we ventured out with them to campsites, sometime around 2015, I remember a sense of surprise that people now had small solar panels to provide power.
For what? I wondered. I found out at Lucky Bay in the Cape Le Grand National Park.
Accumulating power at Cape Le Grand National Park
There is no wired electricity so the accumulation of power is at full capacity. Everyone has a solar panel out charging in the sun and their StarLink dish directed hopefully to the sky.
We’ve now met up with my sister and her family. Her set-up alone could power a small African nation. Granted, she’s planning a big road trip from Alaska to Argentina so she’s been busily getting her purpose-built truck/van ready. If you thought I was a planner, her trip is not for another eight years.
She has her phone and laptop, StarLink connection dish to upload her homemade videos to YouTube, coffee machine (she ‘can’t live without’) her Thermomix to make strawberry daiquiris (so THAT’S what they are for!), her air fryer (still don’t know what that’s for) and even a small washing machine.
It’s quite the setup. I’m beginning to realise we all have things we like to have that make our lives more comfortable. For me, it’s my special camping chair, for her it’s her air fryer.
For T, it’s access to the internet and a reliable source of power. He’s decided we don’t have enough of either.
He hitches a ride back to Esperance with his brother-in-law to pick up an Optus Sim Card so we can have internet access. I don’t really care but it’s the reason I can upload this post and at least it’s not a StarLink connection. He’s now fussing around with the solar panels as after five days without a charge, the van is almost at half capacity.
As Gen Xers, we are defined by our inability to cope with our devices dropping below 50%. Meanwhile the kids cheerfully stream YouTube on iPads with a 6% charge.
Lucky Bay Campground
Lucky Bay Campground is situated near the magnificent Lucky Bay beach in Cape Le Grand National Park. A spot here is so sought after you have to book it six months in advance. There is really good reasons for this. There is pristine white sand, turquoise blue water, rocky peninsulas mixed with a surprising array of flowering bushes for this time of year and even a couple of resident kangaroos very happy to pose for photographs.
Lucky Bay Campground is positively luxurious by National Park standards. It has clean FLUSHING toilets. It has showers warmed by solar heated water. It has some (non-potable) water on tap. It even has an exhausted internet access point. It has several very well-marked walks taking you from one magnificent beach to another slightly more spectacular one.
It’s very beautiful. It is also incredibly windy and the water is freezing. But it’s lovely to see my family again.
Here are some photos thanks to my new Optus SIM Card.
