Today Karen
and I had the day off so we decided to go for a drive out into the country, the
trip today we thought we would go down Southwest Highway find a pub for lunch
and visit Wellington Dam then Collie and head home via Arthur River on Albany
Hwy.
It was
quite a warm day today around 35 degrees most of the trip being the start of
Autumn the fields and bush is all dry after a warm summer with hardly any rain,
we fuelled up in Byford and continued along Southwest Highway, we didn’t stop
much as the trip was nearly 500km long, more just to have a look what is around
for future trips, scouting for old homesites to photograph and some granite
outcrops, which I love to photograph.
Our first
stop was for lunch as it was close to Midday when we left, we stopped at the Wokalup
Hotel to see what was on offer for lunch
there, it was quite busy and it looked like the staff were run off their feet
none of the empty tables were clean, and the menu was quite disappointing it
didn’t have either meal that Karen and I wanted, so we left without buying a
meal, originally the plan was to have lunch at a Pub in Collie, after leaving
Wokalup it was nearly 2pm and most of the pub kitchens usually close for lunch
at around 2:30pm to 3pm.
On our way to Brunswick, we decided to find a pub for lunch.
We stopped at Brunswick Tavern and saw that the dishes we wanted were on the
menu. With an hour left before the kitchen closed, we chose to eat there. I had
Creamy Garlic Prawns with rice, and Karen had a T-Bone with Creamy Garlic
Prawns. We both enjoyed our meals, then we left for Collie.
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As we were
heading for Collie, we noticed a turn off to Honeymoon Pool so we to took a
detour to have a look, we were thinking of going there for our Honeymoon after
we got married, but we ended up getting a trip to Bali as a Wedding Present.
The road to Honeymoon Pool is all sealed but it is a long weekend here in WA
and it was quite busy people were parking on the roadside. We turned around and
headed back towards Collie, our next stop was going to be Wellington Dam we
haven’t been there for a while, the last photos I could find of that was back
in 2015 deciding it was probably going to be busy there as well, we had decided
to leave it for another day.
Arriving in
Collie we had a drive around town and stopped to look at the old trains and to
get an updated photograph of them not much has changed since last time we were
here in 2015
I was going
through my old photos a while ago and came across another photo that I took in Collie a few years ago of an
army tank it wasn’t the greatest of quality and I have always wanted to
photograph it with better camera, we come across it again while we were driving
through Collie so I had to turn around and get some updated photos of it, unfortunately
it has now housed in a small garage like structure so it made photographing it
a little more difficult.
It was
nearly 4pm now and we still had around 200km before we would get home so we
drove through Darken a small town with only a few houses visible from the road
the road here was quite plain only paddocks and I think either canola or wheat
fields which had been harvested, I was on the look out for some nice granite
outcrops to photograph which I did not see any so far on the way. There was
some roadworks going on which slowed our journey down for a few km but after
that I started to see some Granite outcrops which I was keen to stop and take
some photographs but due the roadworks was unable to do so, after we managed to
pass the roadworks I started to see more Granite outcrops as we were getting
closer to Arthur River but with a couple
of cars behind me I couldn’t really stop to take photos, I wanted to go to
Arthur River as I recall when coming back from a trip to Albany with my
daughter a while ago there was some old house ruins I wanted to Photograph. I
didn’t end up stopping as it was getting late, we still had a long drive ahead
of us.
On our way
home we stopped at Williams for Ice Cream, I was going to stop at the river to
take some photos, but it was bone dry I didn’t realize that it dried up in the
summer not like The Harvey or Collie River which both still had some water in
them as we drove over them. Williams was our last stop for the day, we were
just focused on getting home there was still around 140km to go, and it was
nearly 5pm.
Overall, it
was a long but nice drive it is just good to get out of the house and just go
for a drive, we used to do it a lot, now we struggle to find time to do it now
we are both working rarely have the same day off.
All Images are Copyright Mark A. Gray - All rights reserved
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