QLD Odyssey – Part One: Brisbane, 7-11 June
Queensland’s coolest couple; on the road again: back in the travel saddle; pre-Plague pics; Are You Sleeping, Big Brother?; Like a Virgin; sightseeing synopsis; next-level street food – Luke Nguyen at Treasury Casino; trivia and pulled lamb at the Powerhouse; George’s ginormous soles
Maxine and Trevor are two of our Singapore expat friends. Culture vultures, foodies, and probably the coolest couple we know, they’ve also lived in Saudi, in Dubai, and in China for many years.
We met them nearly 20 years ago, not long after we arrived to live in the city state. The circumstances were unforgettable: on the initial night of our first Star Cruise, we bonded with Max, Trevor and their friend Susan Beard over copious G&Ts in a private karaoke room. I seem to remember the staff evicting us at 3am.
Perth City Break, 20-22 May – Roy’s 70th Birthday!
Three score years and ten – a biblical achievement; lawyers, tailors and chefs; Roy – a thing of beauty and a joy forever; revelry at Reveley; ferry to South Perth, lunch at Annalakshmi and all that jazz at Ellington’s; reprise of Facebook party pics, complete with cake and candles
Depending on how many spouses you accumulate in the course of a lifetime, it’s not often that your man turns 70. So now, with Roy achieving the biblical three score years and ten, it behooved me to push the boat out a bit – or at least as far as was reasonable in these travel-restricted times.
This is the House that Roy and Verne Built: Part 1 – Breaking Ground
Boeries, bangers and snags; sangas, sarnies and sarmies; building malarkey background; turfed from the nest; Cyclone Seroja and quo vadis?
Here we are, celebrating the breaking of ground this week at 543 Burns Beach Road, Iluka!
Surrounded by the family – son Carl, Carrie, Mia and Holly; daughter Blaire, Colin and Sam – we broke ground today, Sunday the 17th of April 2021. Son Carl brought the spade, son-in-law Colin furnished the Weber BabyQ, and we supplied the snags* and the mimosas. Only Daughter #1 was missing, sadly – cheers, Wendy!
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.
Flight of the Covid-19 Refugees 1-14 February, Part Two: Esperance
Jerramungup, a toddlin’ town; getting lucky at Lucky Bay; there’s a tavern in the town (of Condingup); Cindy Poole, heart of a glass artist; I say Esp-eh-rance, you say “Esprintz”; three firsts in one day; reviews and summation
This trip was all about Esperance, a destination that boasts some of WA’s – or even Australia’s – best beaches. Albany, Denmark, Augusta and Yallingup were lovely to revisit, but we’d been there before.
Flight of the Covid-19 Refugees, 1-14 February: Part One
Why am I still Down Under? – travel is just so 2019; a mani-pedi moment; fleeing Perth – lockdown narrowly averted; York (again); sheep-centric Wagin; Durban and Umhlanga, the end of an era; Elliot House, Albany – any port in a lockdown
While much of the world has been in crisis, Roy and I have been living the good life in Western Australia. Aside from several months of restrictions from March 2020, it’s been relatively normal. (Relative, that is, to the questionable dismissal of basic human rights, albeit in slightly different ways and to varying degrees, in most parts of the world.)
Historical York, WA, 13-15 October 2020
A tale of two tiny towns; canola blossom prequel and a soapbox moment; Day Trippers, yeah! – York Motor Museum; Burnley House and Settlers Cottages – this and other cases of apostrophic abuse; where to eat, if you’re lucky
“You should spend a night or two exploring the olde-worlde historical Avon Valley,” son Carl had recommended – not once but several times. York had a great motor museum for his dad, and we should try to catch the spring wildflowers.
So, eventually, we did. I booked two nights’ mid-week accommodation at York’s Burnley House and Settlers Cottages through agoda.com. I’d fancied three nights, but Roy thought two would be enough. So now, not having seen everything there is to be seen, I have an excuse for us to go back there.