riverECHO

A few things have changed since we arrived in southwest Australia. We sleep cuddled up in sleeping bags instead of sprawled out with the van doors open and our feet hanging out the back. We’ve found huge forests to camp in and awesome single track mountain biking trails. And we get to play and relax on the weekends instead of trying to cover a bunch of ground to the next town. We’ll be in the southwest for about four weeks until we will point it back east and drive across the Nullarbor (you got it . . . “no” “trees”) to Melbourne to meet up with my sister Shalyn and her husband Randall.

As we drove through a very rainy downtown Perth, it didn’t take us long to move along to the next artsy hip town of Fremantle. The cafes, one of which we visited every day, pubs, used bookstores, and weekly craft markets kept us entertained for a few days. But as the weekend approached we decided to head to the hills and seek out the local mountain biking trails. We found two awesome trails, Marrinup and Turner Hill, just outside of a town called Dwellingup, where we set up camp at a free campground for a few days and had our first campfire since we’ve arrived in the country. We’ve been camping our way around Australia but for some reason it hasn’t really felt like camping until we had a campfire.

Slim needed a bit of a tune up so we had to spend our short work week in the big town of Bunbury. But to our surprise, Bunbury was a pretty cool little town. Our camp was surrounded by water, the Indian Ocean on one side and a lagoon on the other, and there were tons of rabbits. Apparently that rabbit proof fence that runs north to south through Australia didn’t work very well.

After the short week, we made our way up to a place called Wellington National Park where we’ll spend the next couple of days on another series of mountain bike trails at Leonard Hill. The national park is one big Jarrah (a type of tall eucalyptus tree) forest. We are camped below these huge tall trees at Potters Gorge, which may just be my favorite campground so far. It reminds me of camping in Yosemite, minus all the granite cliff walls.

Eucalyptus trees are fire tolerant so when fires spread through the area, they leave their trunks pitch black and their leaves green. A couple of the mountain bike trails we’ve been on weave right through forest that has recently burned. The colors are stunning . . . black trunks against the bright green new growth along the forest floor.

It’s still hard to believe that it’s Thanksgiving. Jean is cooking up a turkey and oyster stuffing at our house in Victor for her sister and family and apparently our fat cat, Salsa, wasn’t going to miss out on the feast and brought in his own mouse to eat under the table. My mom, stepdad, and Anni are meeting up in Sequoia National Park and from the sounds of it, might end up at a Mexican restaurant for dinner. I also just chatted to my Grandma in Arizona, whose voice I haven’t heard since last year. Our call cut out really quickly, but it was so good to talk to you Grandma! I’m not sure we’ll celebrate the holiday in any tradition and although we miss the holiday feel at home, we’ll just have to make do with campfires, mountain bike trails, and the company of each other in this large eucalyptus forest for now!