An email from a friend introduced me to Sarah. Travelling Australia and starting her journey in Perth it was suggested we meet up. I haven’t managed to meet with all the connections suggested along the way but with nearly a month in Perth, I felt this was one to be pursued. We met for lunch. We chatted. We explored. We were on the same page :-). Both of us with no firm plans and wanting to explore more of Western Australia, a road trip was born! A ten day loop of the southwest of the country. Always in search of new and interesting ways to capture photos and memories, before leaving Perth I immortalised our mutual friend George in print in order to snap him in various locations along the way… :-). To include him in our road trip ;-).

We leave Perth with a view to just taking it easy and seeing what we find along the way :-). The first place we find is a small seaside town called Rockingham. We have hotdogs and banana milkshakes and snap George by the sea and a Rockingham sign. We detour to Yalgarup National Park to see Lake Clifton. Very pretty with a sign informing us we can ‘get near to nature’ with a 5km walk through the area we think why not. It is not the most scenic. We also get stopped in our tracks by a reversing JCB that takes a long time to see us… We wait until he does before venturing past! With not the best maintained pathway, I do not recommend this walk. We drive on to Bunbury. We decide to stay the night. We take George up Rotary Lookout Tower by sunset and he also finds Guppy Park, a very odd shaped statue and wears a bikini… In our hostel we are put into room 13 for the night. Sarah decides our roommate looks like a modern day Dracula… She falls asleep very quickly. I genuinely can’t hear him breathing… Lying poker straight, only his head emerges from under the covers… The room in darkness I actually contemplate reading Dracula on kindle… You can imagine what I go to sleep thinking…

The next day we awake and head onto Busselton, another town on the coast in Geographe Bay. I’ve already been but I show Sarah and George the longest jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. George makes it into a foot picture and gets taken with a nautical lady. On through Dunsborough further round the bay, it seems quite the happening place filled with school leavers. Driving all of Geographe Bay taking a pit stop in Eagle Bay, the water is beautiful. We reach Cape Naturaliste at the other end of the bay. It is the northernmost point of the Leeuwin-Naturaliste Ridge (that bit that sticks out on a map of southwest Australia). George climbs the 59 steps of the lighthouse. Then finds himself in a giant connect 4 set that happens to be in the visitor centre. We do some bush walking. Hard work, we make a pledge not to do any more walking trails for a couple of days… George sees sugarloaf rock and the very hilly Yalingup. We get to Margaret River – a famous Australian wine region. I end up leaving George in the car. We go to the local pub and find they have a local cider on tap called George cider. Sarah and I both try it. I say that George is ok, pretty tasty; Sarah informs me ‘I quite enjoyed the George’. I have to take the first George via mobile picture. Sharing George stories with Sarah makes me laugh. A lot :-). We spend the night relaxing and drinking with a Monkey Mia tour buddy who is also in the region :-).