Monday August 31st

Dave left us ‘schooling’ and headed off to the local café. It turned out to be a 50’s style café, staffed by a lovely family who also owned and operated the large drive-in movie ‘theater’ next door. The upside of the café was the yummy goodies and coffee available, the downside: 50’s music running on a continuous loop. Dave came home randomly singing: ‘lollipop, lollipop….’ for the next few days!

He returned for lunch, we dropped him off afterwards and drove to the dune climb area. This was the highlight of this National Park that the children had seen photos of online and could not wait to get to. They spent a long time going up and down the dune, racing down, pacing up, it was a lot of fun. Jake thought it’d be a good idea to roll down but halfway down, had to stop, as it made him feel really sick. I wouldn’t have made it one roll without feeling terrible so I totally understood!

Given the length of stay at the dune, we were quite late collecting Dave and decided to stay at the café for dinner. The kids thought it was fantastic, so much space and at the end of the room, some old style school desks were set up by a large blackboard with lots of chalk. Caitlin went into total teacher mode and gave a great lesson to Becca and Nathan, until they too wanted to write all over the board. It was hard to persuade them away to actually eat something!

The campground offered a Ranger Program each evening, which could count towards the Junior Ranger program. We attended the ‘Hoots and Howls’ program and practiced calling owls and coyote, which was fun. Jake guessed some of the sounds and came up with some good answers to the questions. I think the highlight for the younger two was biking to and from the amphitheater!