Esperance - Australia's Best Beaches

The town of Esperance was voted as the Top Town in WA (and #2 in the country), Twilight Bay was voted as WA's favorite beach in the entire state, and the beach at Lucky Bay has the whitest sand in Australia.  So, what do you do in Espereance - hit the beach of course!  Above left is the coastline along the Great Ocean Drive where there are more than 11 amazing beaches in 11 miles.  The island featured is Observatory Island where in 1792 two French vessels, L'Espereance and Recherche, sought shelter from a storm.  They also gave a lot of French place names to the area.  Above right is Twilight Beach as it's calm, clean, cool waters.

Left is the three boys exploring a rock at Twilight Beach.  October is still spring and the cooler Southern Ocean waters keep a lot of swimmers away until summertime.

The warmest day we had during our camping trip was 24 degrees and the coldest was a high of 17.  Nightime temps were around 10. So, not so bad springtime weather.

Above and below is Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park.  Just a short 3/4 hour drive from town.  We did not go above our knees in the water that morning, but played and hiked in the squeeky fine white sand.  The water is shallow and clear, must be quite refreshing during the hot dry summers.

Hellfire Bay had a little rougher seas, but that didn't stop the kids from swimming and splashing at the beach.  Both adults went in up to their waist, but didn't brave any further.

If Albany has the Dog Rock, then this one must be called Hound Rock or Pooch Stone or Wolf Mound?! 

Below is Jackson warming up after a dip. 

We finally got a photo of a metre long goanna, we saw at least a dozen on our trip through out the Southwest.

Cape Le Grand Beach - low hard flat sandy shoreline that a jumbo jet could land on.  Just to say we did, we drove our Suzuki onto the beach... if we kept driving another 24 km we would of reached town via the coast.

On the drive home we saw something on the road with tire tracks across it.  We made sure it was dead, before Collin picked it up.  Keep in mind that every snake in Australia is poisonous [to varying degrees], except the python, and we are sure that this one isn't a python.  But, even after going through several snake books, Australia's Deadliset Creatures. and the internet, we still couldn't identify it properly.  It might be a whip snake, because of it's slender head, body and tail?  Through oral descriptions, we had 3 different Aussies tell us it could be 3 different types - a burrowing snake, dugite (brown snake), tiger snake. 
Any one else know? Email cbwalker@sasktel.net

One of Esperence's residents - Sammy the Sea Lion, lazily sunny himself by the Tanker Jetty.
We weren't sure which way to choose.  So we just went in the middle.  The boys, including Collin went topless, but Becky had a two piece on (but, naked underneath!).  It didn't really matter anyways as we had the entire beach(es) to ourselves for more than 2 hours.

Caleb and some wildflowers along the Rotary Hill walk trail. 

Esperence's distance from Perth (700 km) keeps the crowds away, so most of the summer (and even more so during the rest of the year) there are few crowds on the many, many beautiful beaches.  And a good portion of the visitors we talked to didn't stick around for long, as Esperence was the last big town on their road trip heading east through the Nullabor and onto South Australia.  To us, it was most definitely worth the drive for the clean white sand and the crystal clear cool waters.