March, 2021 - Travels with Verne and Roy

Camping at Coogee, WA: Snorkelling the Omeo Wreck, March 2021

Day-tripping to Coogee Beach; Roy’s first first sea dip in seven years; gratuitous Maldives flashback; back to Coogee; history of the shipwrecked Omeo; where to stay – then and now; feeling disloyal (again)

Is there no end to the magnificent beaches of Western Australia? I’d never even heard of Coogee Beach until a week ago. What’s more, this is supposed to be autumn – yet here we are, frolicking in the surf and bronzing our bods on the very eve of the annual collaboration between Lindt and the Easter Bunny.

Flight of the Covid-19 Refugees, 1-14 February – Part Four: Glamping in Yallingup

Good morning, campers!; surf, turf, and Kim’s multiple skill sets; spectacular spelunking at Ngilgi Cave; Cape Naturaliste lighthouse trivia; big lunch at Little Fish; the culpable kookaburra at Caves House Hotel; of coffee and chillies in Commonage Road; post-mask postlude

I may have mentioned before now that Roy is not a happy camper. I don’t mean it in the sense of his being generally miserable and grumpy (not in this instance, anyway). I mean he doesn’t do camping.

He doesn’t like caravans. Or even campervans. This is inexplicable to me – I love these things, always have.

Let alone those portable shelters made of fabric or other material stretched over a supporting framework of poles and secured to the ground with cords and stakes. In the 29 years since we met, I had never known him to darken a tent flap.

Yet here we were, camping out for two nights in the grounds of Lynn and Kim’s holiday home in Yallingup, Margaret River.

Flight of the Covid-19 Refugees, 1-14 February – Part 3: Denmark & Augusta

Cabins and kangaroos in Jerramungup; power (and coffee) to the people; weather philosophy and the rejigging of Roy’s internal thermostat; Denmark’s tradie tavern; pelican brief and apostrophic catastrophes in Augusta

Esperance to Jerramungup

“We have a nice caravan park,” the cashier at the local IGA supermarket had said, when we stopped in on our way east to Esperance. And it is nice, as far as caravan parks go – it’s spacious, has plenty of shrubbery, and when I went for a walk around the perimeter I had my first-ever encounter with wild kangaroos.