Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas
have lots of fun, thinking of you back home.
Our love to you all.
The days are good, but a little cool especially with the wind
It’s a little breezy in the morning, but as the day wears on the wind picks up and peaks late afternoon and starts to ease off late at night. The wind speed doubles from the morning wind speed
Tuesday – as we are heading into Margaret River tomorrow for Glen’s dental appointment and to do a browse around, we have basically stayed put today. We walked up town and bought our Salmon and Sea Scallops from the local butcher, who is running a raffle of a Baby Q. Now to win that would be very convenient in deed. Before leaving, we did the washing – the usual weekly chore. There won’t be any trouble in getting that to dry. 
Later this afternoon, we walked the foreshore around to the cut out channel. They have a long sand dune at the river mouth and a number of years ago they cut another channel near the headland for a deeper channel. The wind was quite fierce once we left the inlet side.
This is a huge gum on the foreshore, it has joined two of it’s branches to form a window
The walkway goes right around the inlet.
We walked from the caravan park down to the “You are here” yellow marker on the sign. This is the point where they have cut through an additional channel to allow the tide to flush the channel and boating access, as the river sand bar mouth keeps silting up and moving.
(right) a view of the channel opening
Christmas Eve
Fine, Clear Sunny, the wind was more manageable – we headed off to Margaret River. It is only around half hour drive. Glen went off to his dental appointment and I headed to the supermarket for our last minute lunch items.
The retail area is in the main street and the big supermarkets – Woolworths and Coles are basically one block back. There is plenty of parking available, but that may not be the case next week when the bulk of the tourists arrive. There are some great shops and the area is not overrun by the main franchises. The coffee is at $3.50 and $4.00 a mug – WOW sensible pricing. We had coffee at the Fudge Factory and I had a Mocca – with real chocolate and Glen had a Milo-cino - this is the offering for people who don’t want tea or coffee.
This store looked like a small boutique, but once inside it just went on and on through the entire block. If you wanted a gift, you would have been sure to find just what you were looking for.
A couple of really pretty hedged plants in the park behind the main street. I think the first one is a Hebe but not sure about the Hibiscus style one – it had sandpaper like leaves.
We had a nice lunch at Squid Lips, we shared a serve of Lemon Pepper Squid and chips, just as well as we could not eat a generous serve each. We have found everyone to be very happy, friendly and helpful.
We also took opportunity to open the trust account required by Coral for our final build payment and picked the perfect day to do it as the bank was empty.
Time to drive along Caves Road and visit a few more of the one way roads to the coastline.
We headed out to Prevelly Beach where the Margaret River enters the ocean. The swell was up and there were some big sets coming through. There were kite surfers and sailboard surfers making the best of it. Certainly this is the safest way to surf this area. The kite surfer was far the fastest with speed. There were other board surfers over the other side of the river but in the wash. Definitely either Kite or Sail is the way to go with big surf here, so much easier to get out the back again.
Great beach infrastructure, lots of car parking, BBQ’s and toilets, walkways and steps down to the beach. There were coffee vans and hamburger vans there as well for the hungry surfers.
Back along the road, we got a good view of the Margaret River as it reaches the ocean.
There was an abandoned building which was quite large, it seemed like a house but it also had a industrial look about it. You can see it’s location on the right hand side of the first photo. Will have to ask at the information centre.
Next stop was Redgate Beach. The first big sign warns of dangerous rips and deaths in the area.
Further along Caves Road is Lake Cave. There are numerous caves to visit, they are all different, but how many caves do you really need to see. We had decided that Mammoth Cave would be it. Each cave entry is $22 each.
Lake Cave has a nice interpretive centre and you can walk out to the suspended deck and look out over the sink hole entry to the cave. It is much deeper than Mammoth Cave with over 300 steps down to the start of the cave. A large tree within the base of the sink hole has just collapsed taking out one of the timber walkways. Now that would have been terrifying to see that happen.
This is a man made replica of the cave in the interpretive centre. Excellent workmanship, as it looked so real.
Bones found in the cave system and illustration of what once lived here, a very long time ago.
Way down the bottom are people, walking decks and a very large tree down.
This is more of a close up of the dropped tree, you can see the base of it to the right of the trunk. and where it took out the walk way to the bottom of the picture. The view deck has three very large circular glass windows to stand on and view through. Even though I don’t have problem with height, I wasn’t keen to stand on the glass, my head was saying “danger Will Robinson” – for those who don’t know – a famous line from the robot of the sixties show “lost in space”, which would be the case if that glass gave way.
Now for the photographs of the Karri forest with the bracken fern under story, it really is something special and is just in one small part of the drive.
Finally, not a Karri but driving through the pine forest on our way to Augusta a couple of days ago, we picked up our Christmas Tree – with visions of Griswald’s Christmas Tree on top of the car, we restrained ourselves and just a picked a small branch.It is nothing like the east coast pines, looks and smells great, just as a Christmas pine tree should. We put it in a drink bottle full of water and wedged it in our timber storage container.
