well today is done.. talk about windy!!.. reports from Perth is it's freezing cold, it might be warmer here but a tad breezy :)

quiet morning still fixing power problems, Mark had the opportunity to go shopping again for a new battery charger and new transformer for the solar panels.. we are now all charged up and ready to go..

this afternoon we had a quick trip around town, checked out the port watched a few extremely large ships sail in and out of the harbour and a couple being loaded... anyone know the answer to what they use the helicopters for??? we can only assume to take the pilots out to the ships?

We have done a big grocery shop, washing and ready to head off to Eighty Mile Beach tomorrow :) looking forward to 3 days of fishing (we are taking bets as to who will catch the first fish, Jacob is odds on favourite.

Below is Jacob's first ever real email.. so proud of him

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Dear Miss Martin

We have had a great trip so far l can't wait till we get to Broome.

At the moment we are in South Hedland, tomorrow we are going to eighty mile beach for three days.

so far we've been to Karijini after two nights camping by the roadside.

Karijini is awesome, there are lots of anthills, some of them are very big. There are lots of gorges and waterfalls. Two of the gorges are Dales and Kalamina and also Fortescue Falls which is very steep and rocky. There are stairs down to the bottom of the waterfall where you can swim and further along is Fern Pool. There are fish in the pool and bats on the way to the pool hanging form the trees. we went to the visitors centre and we got a sheet to get a junior ranger badge. To get the badge we had to complete the sheet which had lots of activities like a word search, writing down animals you have seen in the park and answering questions. When we were in the visitor centre we saw Emu eggs, outside the door of the centre there was a stone Bungarra and on the inside there was a stone Olive Python. There was a big display on the wall showing the star constellations you might see in the night sky.

South Hedland is great. It took us a while to find somewhere to camp, because the first place we tried was all full, so the person who worked there told us there were two more places one that has power and one that doesn't. We went to the one that doesn't have power but that changed into a petrol station for trucks so we went to the one that had power that was called Blackrock.

Today we went to Port Hedland and saw the big ships, we watched one come in and saw them loading the iron ore. We could see 3 different boats being loaded. The one we saw coming in, looked like it was from Italy because it was called Sebastino Colismo.

We will send some pictures soon

Say hi to everyone at school and tell them I'm having a great time. I'll send another email soon to tell you some more about our big holiday

Jacob