Oct 05

Every year since we were married in the year 2000, we have celebrated our anniversary away somewhere special. The first year anniversary we had to make up for our unplanned, unorganised, raining honeymoon in Byron Bay. So we spent the weekend at Couran Cove on South Stradbroke Island, where I remember spending what seemed hours playing Connect Four in the bar drinking red wine listening to the band until unexpectedly Kev joined the band to sing Red Red Wine. The following day began with a huge hangover, but managed to ride our bicycles around the island, and saw a kangaroo swimming across a lake, yes it was not an illusion! The third year we spent it at our favourite beach in Coolum, Sunshine Coast, with dinner at a beautiful Thai restaurant on the water. The next year, our fourth anniversary we went up to Cairns, lashed out and stayed at the Hilton, even scored an upgrade! We spent a day at Green Island snorkelling the reef, and the following day, hired a car and explored Port Douglas, Palm Cove (a classic spot – much nicer that P.Douglas), Mossman, and Kuranda. And finally..what this section is all about, our fifth anniversary we thought we’d return to where it all began, in Western Australia!

After arriving from the 5 hour flight and surviving the taxi ride from hell, we checked in to the accommodation, and set off to explore all the sights we had enjoyed 6 years previously. The Bell tower on the river was our first stop, which is a beautiful site and I remember it was still under construction when we were there last.

Bell Tower, Perth

Perth has a fabulous public transport system, and you can get around a lot of the city for free on the brand new Metro buses. So we took free bus to Subiaco, and to (what was) our favourite pub, The Subiaco Hotel, or ‘The Subi’ as most call it, to celebrate with a couple of Cosmopolitan cocktails. We wandered through the streets of Subi remembering the times when we would hang out at this cool location years before.

City of Perth & Swan River in background, photo taken from South Perth

The following day we got up with the sun and hiked up to the top of Kings Park to enjoy the breathtaking view of the Swan River and the city. Then we set off by train to Fremantle. We’d spent plenty of time in Freo when we were younger but mainly just for the markets, and I do remember a Cheesecake crawl we did one night..anyway this time we did the touristy thing, and looked through the Shipwreck Museum, the Roundhouse gaol, the old Fremantle Goal, the Maritime Museum, the old Lunatic Asylum which is now converted to an art gallery where Philipa Nikluwsky, the WA botanical artist had her life work on display. All we could afford was to purchase some gift cards with prints of her art, the real stuff was fabulous! We even made a trip back to the little jewellers shop where we got our wedding rings made.

Fremantle

This took up most of the day, but we had planned to spend the late afternoon at Cottlesloe Beach, looking out at the beautiful ocean drinking Margaret River wine, which we did.

Cottesloe Beach

We picked up our hire car and set off down the highway to Bunbury where we lived for 3 ½ years when we were much younger. We stuck our heads into MGY Accounting to get a huge hug from our adopted mother Josie Hall who owns the firm and who’s home we were staying in for a couple of nights during the holiday. We were keen to get to the Capel Vale vineyard and were pretty pleased with our purchase of ‘Duck’, and I was awestruck by the amount of roses in the gardens, the sandy ground and cool climate definitely are the winning ingredients for perfect roses over there.

Capel Vale Winery

We spent that night catching up with Josie, Tommie, their daughter Sandra and son Campbell Hall, who were our surrogate family when we lived in WA. We miss them immensely and Josie always asks when we are coming home because there’s always a bed for us.

But this time, we got to go camping..in their backyard!! As all their bedrooms are full at the moment, we enjoyed comfy accommodation in Tommie’s top of the range Camper Trailer for the night – we thought that was great. Next day we set off for Margaret River!! When we lived in Bunbury this was a monthly trip for us, and was our introduction to wine..and didn’t know at the time how good we had it!!

We stopped at Bunker Bay and Eagle Bay on the way down and the water was looking pretty nice, but the storm clouds were holding back just enough for me to get this photo, I think the colour of the water would have looked better on a clearer day. Its still pretty natural down this way, the resorts haven’t quite spoiled this area yet, however, Yallingup is starting to progress and I know the locals and regular holiday visitors are not happy about the changes.

Eagle Bay

Well, Margaret River the town hadn’t changed much, we were there on Melbourne Cup Day and every single resident must have been at the pub, as it was looking a bit messy! Can you believe we sat in front of a fire and ate soup for lunch in November!! This is partly why I couldn’t live back here, way too cold for this frog. Anyway, there were plenty of new wineries around, and, being mid week and Melbourne Cup day there were no other cars on the roads, and had the wineries pretty much all to ourselves! The wildflowers that grow ‘wild’ on the road sides were out in force and so colourful, here’s an example.

Wildflowers

Driftwood Winery used to be my all time favourite, including the restaurant. I’m not a port drinker but they do a great one, in fact my mother bought a bottle of it when she was here, its that good.

Driftwood Winery

We visited heaps of other wineries such as MadFish (Howard Park), Woody Nook, Amberley, Brettany, Brookvale..and more..too many they all started to taste the same. But it was nice to break it up with visits to the art galleries, the cheese factories, the chocolate factory, fudge factory, the lavender farm etc. A trip to Margarets is not complete without seeing the awesome surf at Prevally and the mouth of the River. It was absolutely freezing and the wind was howling, but the committed ‘crazy’ surfers were out there taking on the waves. We spent that afternoon, in the park enjoying a bottle of red and eating some of the marinated feta we purchased…perfect!

The following day we set out to Cape Leuwin to the lighthouse and see where the oceans meet. We have this exact photograph when we were 20, nearly a decade ago, in some box somewhere!

Cape Leuwin

We visited a couple of more wineries today, Leuwin Estate and Voyager, but not for their wines, to see their amazing estates. The gardens at Voyager were spectacular, we admired these for ages and loved their rose garden. The white painted building was very unique and even nicer inside.

Voyegor Winery

We drove back to Bunbury a different way cutting across following the Blackwood River, which is a very pretty drive, we had to give way to some emus crossing the road at one stage! It is real hermit country around this way, perfect if you want a bush retreat, its so lush and green, and the huge Karri trees are an awesome backdrop. We spent another night at the Halls and arranged dinner at a restaurant with a few old friends, which was great fun. Then it was back to Perth to stay with other friends of ours, the Heinrichs at their place in City Beach. With only one more day left, we set out to the Swan Valley which is only 30 minutes north of Perth, and did one last tour around, promising each other not to buy any more wine, but did…so my hand luggage was a pretty tricky packing effort. And our holiday had quickly come to an end, and tried to stay awake for our red eye, midnight flight home, back to reality!