Lots more houses than we expected to see - Bunbury, and all its feeder towns, has grown immensely and it seemes to have lost its charm. Maybe it was the rain though as that will sour the best opinions.
We decided we needed to find a van park as the opportunity for free camping is very limited in these populated areas, so we settled into one outside of the town in East Picton.
This van park is mostly used by permanent dwellers so it wasn't the most welcoming looking place, but apart from the ablutions cleaning times it was good enough for a generally rainy couple of days. Ablutions cleaning? Yeah, the toilets and showers were sparkling clean andnice to use, but why they close them between 8am and 10am to handle the cleaning I just don't know. It was a most inconvenient time for slack arsed, late risers like us.
So, Bunbury - well, the place has had money spent on it and everything is smart and new and clean, but it rained a lot and we decided to pack up and move on to escape the misery.
As we headed to Perth we thought we'd drop in on the sleepy little river/sea side town of Mandurah. We had paid many a visit to this lovely little place when we lived in Perth some seven years ago, so when we found that it had metamorphosed into a city with kilometres of shopping and nowhere to park a caravan we were severely disappointed. We didn't even get out of the car (well, we had nowhere to park) and we headed back onto the Kwinana Freeway which seemed to be carrying a heck of a lot of traffic with much of it nose to tail at 110kph in the rain. Because of my cautious approach to rain wet roads and my desire to keep a decent stopping distance between me and the car in front I was constatly having cars pulling into that gap. So much so that it felt like I was reversing down the freeway at times.
And then we hit the traffic jam. Caused by nothing more than the volume of traffic, we were stopped for periods of time and just crawling for others. However, we eventually reached a van park in Gwelup in the north of Perth and booked in for five days.
The first day we had a little auto electrical work done on the car and just sheltered from the rain. The second day (the Saturday) we checked out Perth's shopping and just like the roadside stalls further south, the shops have a huge choice of fresh (I mean VERY fresh) fruit and veggies. We poor ittle Darwinians are just not used to this sort of thing! One place we found was called the Sud Shed and it is a supermarket owned by a consortium of local farmers who put their produce through it - superb food and cheap as.
We also caught a movie - Kingsman - that was a hoot. If you get a chance, go and see it. It's great. Afterwards we tok a walk across the park to a pub where Karen won the meat tray raffle. We won't need to buy meat for a while!
Sunday is quiet in Perth as they don't have Sunday shopping so we headed off to the Swan Valey to inspect the wineries and just get out of suburbia for a while. It seems to have been a popular idea as the place was crowded so we found a pub that had been a favourite of ours years ago (the Rose and Crown in Guildford) and settled in to watch Geelong get thrashed by Fremantle on the TV. Ah well, that's life. Nice beer and nice place though.
On Monday we had booked a trip out to Rottnest Island. We never made it there when we lived here before so it was something on our bucket list.
We hired bicycles to get around on and I can confirm that while you never forget how to ride a bike, your butt certainly forgets how to absorb the impacts without causing bruising and pain that lasts for some days afterwards. Still, we had a heap of fun pedalling around and checking out the sights.
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