Cliff Head had a few warbling birds that thought we should enjoy the sunrise so they started early for us.  Our drive is along the back of the Indian Ocean sand dunes so the scenery is mostly heath type country, the wattle is just starting to bloom, with a few dried dune lakes with a lot of white sand dunes showing their heads.  Our first stop was at Green Head, a beautiful little fishing village with a few wharves for the fishing boats, a short path to the hilltop lookout (that was a wooden bandstand with seats all around) plus an osprey nest pole with an old crayfish pot on top for the nest.  The water here is so clear & the view from the small lookout back over the bay & the wharf was superb.  The outlying reef does a great job of keeping the waves at bay so it is only very small ripples on the beach, quite unusual.  We drove through Jurien Bay but weren’t impressed & stopped next at Cervantes at the carpark right on the beach.  Again the bandstand lookout on top of the dunes gave a superb view over the turquoise & indigo waters off Cervantes & a great view of the close reef system that protects the shores.

We headed inland through more & more wattle country, sometimes there is vast swathes of yellow wattle just starting to fully open into flower.  A lot of the country becomes farmland with very green grass & fat contented sheep & cows, plus massive fields of rich green wheat & brilliant yellow canola.  We also came across a wind farm at Emu Downs, around 50 wind generators, set in a field of yellow wildflowers, it looked incongruous.  We stopped & looked at some wildflowers & took a few photos of them, we don’t see these in Canberra.  The drive was through some of the richest & greenest looking farmland we have seen on this trip, with the yellow fields of canola hurting the eyes at times, it is so brilliant, contrasting with the eucalypt greens.

Our next stop was New Norcia, a settlement founded by Benedictine monks in 1847.  The settlement is just monastery, convent, church, school, plus the warehouses used for the wheat, flour, olive oil production & machinery.  The stone & brick buildings are impressive, they are certainly large & very religious looking.  We didn’t spend nearly as much time there as we would have liked.

The rest of the trip to Perth was mostly through farmland, however, the closer we got to Perth, the more wineries appeared, with lots of small vineyards all over the place.  The satellite navigation assisted us immensely in finding my cousin Craig & family in the suburb of Shoalwater, very handy to the naval base they work at off the coast of Rockingham.  It was great to see them again & see how much the two girls have grown since we last saw them, it’s amazing how fast they grow up.  Craig & Denise cooked a great BBQ dinner for us, which we washed down with some nice red, plus a great Muscato for desert & a very sweet port to top it off.  We spent a lot of time talking & laughing & Mel & I had some great tussles on the couch, she is very ticklish.  We went to bed very late & there were tired faces all round next morning.