It may seem to you that our blog has fallen by the wayside somewhat and to some extent that's true. The distractions of work and city living in Perth meant that our blog fell down the list of priorities so we are woefully behind and for that we apologise to our loyal followers, all ten of you.
Hopefully, the phone/Skype calls have made up for our lack of prose and we will eventually go back to fill in the gaps for our own sake more than anything.
In summary, we spent 5 months in Perth and four of those we were blessed with a warm welcome and a wonderful Aussie hospitality with my relatives, Simon and Nicci Whitehouse, Simon being my Dad's first cousin and so (and we have this debate on every meeting) I think it makes him my second cousin. Anyway, they were extremely kind to put us up (and put up with us) for such a long time. Not only this but they gave us an amazing Aussie Christmas experience, a beautiful steak on the barbie and of course, a pavlova. They truly welcomed us to their family and it was great to get to know them, their twin sons, Ben and Andrew and their partners, Anna and Jacqui and of course, their grandchildren, Maeve and Freya not forgetting their wonderful dog, Moses, recipient of many belly rubs. We have also enjoyed the hospitality of Simon's sister, Jane while we were in Adelaide and we will update on that later on.
In January I got a job at a nearby family-run deli, Scutti where I worked around 25 hours a week selling and slicing the cured meats and preparing fresh salads and other items for the shop. It was a great experience for me and I met some wonderful people who were part of the team.
Tom got a job at a Japanese restaurant about 25mins away by car which served as an interesting introduction to how fickle the hospitality industry can be, particularly for those of us on working holiday visas.
Our last month was spent in Como, a nearby suburb to the deli. Tom had some shifts at a nearby restaurant but not many hours which meant that it was time for us to hit the road so, on the 26 April we set off in the rain. The night before, our friends gave us a wonderful send off in the pub which resulted in us setting off from Perth a little bit later than planned but we hit our target of spending our first night in Busselton, celebrating our arrival with cocktails on the beach followed by Chinese food in town.
Busselton is a charming coastal town which has the claim to fame of being home to the longest jetty in the Southern hemisphere at 1.8km long. It juts out into the waters of Geographe bay and having undergone a recent restoration, you are now required to pay the princely sum of $2.50 to walk along its length which we (and many others) did in a bracing wind. We gave the underwater observatory at the end a miss as while it is a cool idea, it seemed a bit pricey and we doubted being able to see all that much given the blustery conditions above. It is a rather nice jetty and it even has a charming train as one option to travel along its length. Timber was the main industry to put Busselton on the map and to warrant the building of such a huge jetty, the last extension happened in1969. Our jaunt along its length saw us pause at many an information panel or gaze at the various arty sculptures and comment on the lack of life rings and in some places, complete lack of railing. Don't worry, Mum, we didn't fall in.
From Busselton we headed to Yallingup via Bunker Bay to check out the beach and we spotted dolphins in the sea. By the time we arrived in Yallingup, a tiny settlement, the rain which seemed to have followed us since our departure from Perth, had well and truly arrived so we hunkered down, grateful for the warm and dry of the car. Yallingup is one of those small, creative communities where the local shop is also a post office and cafe so we called in there to send off a parcel and discovered next door a bakery dedicated to making kugelhopf which were as delicious as they were unexpected, we took two as sustenance for the day ahead, a chocolate orange one and an olive with walnut. Lovely stuff.
Despite the rain, our trip was off to a good start.
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