Out On The Wide, Wide Open Road Part One

Getting up early on vacation seems to be a thing I do. Usually it is when I am on a group tour but I've seemed to manage it on my own as well. This is balls.

I don't know what time the sun comes up in Perth. I don't think it spends a lot of time being down.
My airbnb is in a wonderful area full of trees which means it is full of birds. Birds, as we all know, sit and wait for the barest trace of light from the sun at which point they erupt into cacophonous song. Non stop. Until the sun goes down for a little while again. Most times I don't mind birdsong but morning birdsong is the absolute worst when I am trying to get just a little bit of a lay in. No amount of googling produced results for "bird in Perth that makes a god awful noise."

At any rate, I am up and waiting for my cab at 0630 and the sun is fully up and heating the world. I don't know how long it takes to hail a cab or how long it takes to get to my destination, so I gave myself an hour. The cab came within 5 minutes. Impressive.

We hit the road for Margaret River.
Along the way, our guide/driver Gordon is very informative. He is Scots but has lived here for 30 years. He is really damn good at his job.

At one point, we pass by a field of bundled hay and I am once again reminded that Perth is Calgary.

There is a lot of agriculture in this area. I don't know why I was surprised by this - people need to eat! I think I figured it was just in another area of Australia.

I was very much Queen Elizabeth on this portion of the drive:

I can at least laugh at myself.

As we continued along, I saw something that brought me much joy.

Marshmallows!! They even call them marshmallows. Their marshmallows are multi-coloured! Sometimes striped! MARSHMALLOWS!
After this whenever someone saw them, it was quickly pointed out.

We carried on down to Busselton. This was a vacation area from early on for the rich. This continues today, but it is also for the middle class. You can do anything here, from roughing it to church camps to "caravan villages" (which I've taken to think are trailer parks and not RV parks) to high end accommodation. It really is a beautiful little area.

Busselton is also home to the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere. It is 1.8 km long. There is a tourist train that goes on it, though we did not have enough time.

The ocean in this area is something else. The colours blew my mind. There were spots of an almost glowing turquoise, a deep blue, a warm blue, and almost a green. I'm not near good enough to capture it on camera.

James living his best life.

Here I was thinking that Busselton was named after the hustle and bustle that came with all the vacationers. Nope. It was named after the Bussell family. They arrived from England between 1830-1834 and farmed. They struggled a lot and eventually found good farmland in the area. As Australia isn't very old, their descendants are still alive and kicking today. Probably not as farmers.

Next: caves and capes.