Margaret River Part 2

by Miss Penny Black

Our second full day in MR was a tour called ‘All About Margaret River Wine and Chocolate Tour’, which was accurate but not very catchy. The company was just two guys, Dani was our drive for the day and he was from Chile, having moved to Australia four years ago. If you’re looking for a tour in the MR region, I’d highly recommend this one. Dani was an excellent guide who was friendly, knowledgeable and passionate about the region and supporting the smaller, family-owned businesses that were resisting the big companies that are buying up smaller wineries.

We were picked up from our apartments and joined a retired couple from Sydney, two sisters from Norway, and a couple of retired ladies from England. Everyone was very friendly and it was a great group to spend the day with, even if the couple from Sydney didn’t believe me when I told them the birds we could see at the farm were peacocks, not lyrebirds. I’ll let you be the judge.

First stop was a farm experience where we fed llamas, emus and then sat down for a breakfast of scones and tea or coffee. Something to fill the stomach before the wine tasting started!

We also stopped at Cowerup, a little tourist town we had already had a quick walk around the day before, to visit a chocolate maker called Temper Temper. They did some unusual flavours, including one with cauliflower!

They actually made the chocolate on the premises from imported cocoa beans. I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else in Australia that does that on such a small scale.

We had one wine tasting before lunch, where we sat outside in the garden of Juniper Winery, where an enthusiastic Englishman told us each wine was excellent. None of them really took my fancy, but it was a beautiful place to start our day’s drinking.

We stopped briefly at a lookout where I saw a whale spout in the far distance – I got very lucky on this trip with spotting the puffs of water out near the horizon, although sadly we didn’t see any close to land.

Lunch was at an olive farm and restaurant. We had ordered our food earlier so service was quick and we got to try their range of oils and preserves. Charmaine and I shared a mushroom pasta (divine) and delicious bruschetta before heading off to the next two wineries.

Winery 2 was a small producer and the lady who talked us through their wines was one of the owners. She was very knowledgeable and I found trying their rosé interesting as she gave us two samples, produced from the same grapes in two different years. Not only was the taste very different, but the colour was striking – one was a pale warm tawny and the other was a cool pink!

The third winery of the day was extremely generous with their tasting selection and we ended up ordering a mixed case sent home. In their vineyard I saw the biggest flock of black cockatoos I’ve ever seen – at least 30. At home we get the ones with yellow stripes under their tails, but these had white stripes.

Luke, Charmaine and I said goodbye to the group at about 4pm and had a little rest before going to the weirdest building on the main street, it was a bit steam-punk/cuckoo clock style. The guy at the front desk seemed mildly perturbed that we’d arrived without a booking but the food was great.

The restaurant had lots of little spaces, not one big room. I recommend going there if you go to MR… but make a booking!

It’s two restaurants plus accommodation all in one premises.

Day 3! 22/9/25 Coffee, Art, A Beach And Chocolate

Our last full day in Margaret River. I woke up early and went for a little solo walk. I find if I don’t spend at least a bit of time by myself when I’m on holidays I go mad. Or rather, I get mad and Luke bears the brunt. So I went and had a coffee in a little cafe that was also a health food shop and I watched people coming in and out. Then I walked back to the apartments and realised Luke might like a coffee so I got one for him from a bakery on the main street that had the best looking pastries I’ve seen in a long time. I didn’t end up going back for any, which I’m a bit sad about!

Luke and I took a walk after breakfast and had a look at some street art, and at a gallery nearby. It had an exhibition by Yorkshire artist, Chris Williamson, who did illustrations for children’s books, but also had little sculptures on the wall next to each original pice and you could look in the drawing for the sculpture. His work was very intricate and beautiful.

We met up with Charmaine and our next stop was the Elephant Beach Cafe. it’s the only cafe in the area that is right on the beach and it had a magnificent view of the beach, cliffs and emerald green water. We watched the wait staff whisk all the plates away to avoid attracting the seagulls that plague every outdoors space.

We walked up to the headland and looked further along the coast. There was an interesting rock formation under the water where seaweed had filled in the cracks, making tessellating shapes. I was very glad of my sunglasses, everywhere in Margaret River is so blinding!

Astonishingly, Charmaine didn’t suffer any injuries on this trip. Maybe the curse has lifted!

In the afternoon we visited two chocolate shops. The first was the Margaret River Chocolate Company, which is big but I didn’t find their range of produce very interesting.

We visited a smaller business nearby that had a smaller selection but talked us through a tasting of chocolate from different regions around the world. We could taste the difference between African and South American chocolate and bought some to take to Rottnest Island for our friends to try.

Our last stop of the day was back to Cowaramup (again) and we managed to find, in the tiny strip of shops, two shops we hadn’t previously visited. We bought some cheese and ended up having a lovely evening on our balcony drinking some of the wine we’d bought and eating the cheese with some relish and crackers. This always reminds me of Luke’s parents, Lea and Pete, and their long evenings of cheese and chatting!

Busselton Jetty, Thursday September 25/9/25

We left Margaret River before 8am, still being on Melbourne time. Poor Charmaine was still waking up at 2am!

As always, we turned up quite early, and had time for breakfast at The Goose, a cafe right by the tourist office in Busselton. Another restaurant with a beautiful view and the weather was perfect.

Always Luke chooses dessert for breakfast!

We boarded the little train that ran along the pier and had a chat to a nice family who recommended a place with sunset views in Fremantle the following night. I booked a table straight away.

The trip along the jetty was nice but the underwater observatory at the end was really my cup of tea! A circular cement structure with windows along a the way that circled down, and you could look through at the ecosystem that had built a reef on the jetty pylons.

Going scuba diving out here would be amazing! There’s an underwater sculpture garden too, although we couldn’t see it. Several days previously two young blue whales had been swimming around the jetty – sadly not on our day!

The reef has only been growing for a few years but there’s so much to see.

We decided to walk back and were glad or our hats and long sleeves, the sun felt quite spicy.

Feeling like we’d done everything we needed to do, we got in the car and headed for Fremantle.

We had booked rooms at a Rydges hotel that had once been an old pub. It had a beautiful veranda around the outside but the inside was more modern and cavernous.

Kelvin has flown in that afternoon so Charmaine went to meet him. Luke and I had a couple of drinks in the bar then walked through the park to the Bathers Beach restaurant. There were some very photogenic tugboats in the harbour next door and an octopus sculpture too.

One of my favourite photos from the trip

Bathers Beach itself isn’t large but a few people were gathered for the sunset. Inside the restaurant it was a bit blinding, but the food was good and we shared a bunch of small plates.

Apart from a huge, empty Ferris wheel, there wasn’t much going on around our hotel at night so after a couple of drinks in the bar we headed to bed, still somewhat on Victorian time.

Next stop: Rottnest Island!

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 6: Imst to Innsbruck

by Miss Penny Black

I’ve taken a lot more photos of tractors than I anticipated. I didn’t even mean to take this one, it just rolled into the shot.

Today was going to be our longest day yet (65km) and initially I’d been dreading it as the road surfaces of the first few days had been steep and gravel. However, yesterday was mostly asphalt and it seemed like the closer we got to Innsbruck, the better the road would be. Being well stocked with medication to combat itchy eyes made me feel more confident too. If I can be indelicate, the previous day had also not been quite as torturous in the seat, so that was a bonus too.

After a massive ten hours of sleep (for me anyway) we got down to breakfast at about 7am. Breakfast at this hotel started at 6:30am, the previous hotel was 8am. There really should be a standardisation of breakfast hours in hotels and when I am elected president of the world it will be one of my first ten new laws*.

Jane and Rutherford sat next to us at breakfast and I am proud to say I won the wordle challenge for the day (fastest *and* fewest guesses). I forgot to post the photo I took of the four of us the previous day so here it is.

Right after our guardian angels pointed us to the nearest pharmacy.

This hotel had champagne on offer with the breakfast buffet but since 90% of the clientele were about to mount up for a day of cycling, I can’t imagine much of it was drunk.

Farewell, Hotel Neuner, your meals were excellent and not eye-wateringly priced.

Our hotel was right by the bike trail and so it was a matter of moments to be on our bikes and heading out of town. There were a few short, steep hills to begin with, then a lovely section of dappled forest riding.

The majority of the day was spent going between 20 and 35kph and so we made it to Innsbruck a bit before 3pm. Here’s a few sights from the trail.

We rode alongside this river most of the day.

A small herd of cows blocked the road and we looked at them for a short while until a guy on a bike came towards them from the other direction and shouted at them and pushed them out of the way. Not a tactic I would’ve tried!

The valley floor was very flat and mostly farmland.

While he loved the forest sections and some of the farmland with all its vegetation, Luke said it was the most boring day, scenery-wise. I felt it was a relief not to have a sheer drop right next to me at any point.

Luke stopped by Innsbruck airport but sadly no planes flew low overhead. Behind us was the local beach – giant pebbles and freezing cold water.

We stopped in Innsbruck to check how far away our hotel was and it just so happened to be right across the road from the point at which we’d stopped. The tour app directs you to the middle of town and we hadn’t thought about precisely where the hotel was. Lucky we checked!

The hotel is called ‘Rufi’s’ which doesn’t translate well into English. The guy at the front desk was lovely and we put away our bikes then availed ourselves of our complementary drinks.

So there you go, we finished our bike tour from St Moritz to Innsbruck. Approximately 250km across two countries. The route had been rated ‘moderate’ but we’d thought that having e-bikes would compensate for our lack of fitness or experience. Although we made it, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy to anyone else! It was more mentally draining than physically problematic for me, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so scary – although the worst part was the detour on day 3.

In summary!

The best bits were:

The views

The weather

The public pool/spa at Zernez

The local food

The very polite and patient drivers in Austria and Switzerland

The decent route signage

The excellent roadside amenities, in particular the frequent public fountains with pure spring drinking water

The worst aspects were:

The bikes were for city riding, not gravel, the tyres were awful for the conditions

The complete lack of support from Eurobikes and the fact that ‘the natural adventure company’ was just another name for a company we’d actively been trying to avoid

The way hotels did not cater for warm nights by offering a sheet or light blanket, let alone a fan or aircon

The flies – they are everywhere, including indoors

The atrocious smell of manure for about 50% of the ride

The poor performance of the two apps and that day 5 on the app did not allow any route guidance

So, how much did it cost? The seven nights of accommodation plus breakfast, e-bike hire and bag transfers was $5,422K AUD for both of us. Most of the hotels were around $300 to $400 a night ($350×7 = $2450). We paid extra for electric bikes but I shudder to think what the trip would’ve been like without them.

While it is a lot for a week’s travel, this is a very expensive part of the world and the views are tremendous. The entire route has views of snow-capped jagged mountains and fields of flowers. The most scenic part was day 4, between Ardez and Ftan. A cheaper and easier way to enjoy the sights would be to use the local bus system to get about and walk between some of the most picturesque places.

We saved a bit of money by eating large breakfasts, skipping lunch and buying most of our snacks from the supermarket.

We ate our way through several packets of these biscuits over the course of the week.

Anyhow, on to a relaxing day in Innsbruck before catching the train to Hallstatt!

* I’m having a really hard time deciding on my other nine but they will definitely include a standardisation of electrical sockets and better pillows for Europeans.

15Jun2023

Eurobike Tour: Day 5: Ried to Imst

by Miss Penny Black

After our usual ‘stuff ourselves to the brim’ breakfast we hit the road. I took my strongest hayfever meds and didn’t suffer too badly in the morning. At about 12pm we cycled through Landeck, a larger town than any we’d seen so far.

We cycled past Jane and Rutherford, who stopped for a chat and said they’d just been to a chemist! So I went in and bought two replacement bottles of nasal spray and two bottles of eye drops, which now brings my total quantity of hay fever meds to seven.

We stopped at a cafe for a drink which turned out to be more like a dessert – a very ice cream heavy iced chocolate and iced coffee. They came with three long wafers to scoop up the icecream. Delicious!

Heading out of Landeck was a bit of road riding, then gravel, then a lovely tarmac bike path.

Not far out of Landeck we saw this interesting ruin. Imagine living up there! You certainly wouldn’t be popular with the postman.

Lots of horses around, particularly palominos.

We stopped in a little village to refill our soft water bottles and found this curious religious statue. Is it Mary or Eve? Or is this a commentary on how all the women in the bible are either mothers or of ill repute?

A little further along we decided to stop at what looked like a charming little cafe.

It seemed small but was like the tardis as we went in.

Hundreds of seats and a dozen different shops. From the other side it was clearly a Highway service station. We ended up buying ice cream and sitting outside. Coconut for me, caramel for Luke.

The day’s ride was pretty easy compared to the previous days and, apart from a wrong turn down an extremely low and creepy (probably haunted) tunnel, we made it to our hotel without too many worries.

The path was a lot easier in every way and so we made pretty good time, arriving around 3pm.

Time for a drink at the restaurant.

Most of our discussion over drinks revolved around the excessive number of flies in Switzerland and Austria and the complete lack of flyscreens. No matter where you sit they are landing on your plate and no one else seems terribly bothered by them.

We ended up having dinner at 6, knudels (mac and cheese) and salad for me, cordon Bleu and chips for Luke. mine had dried caramelised onions on top, which I will have to try at home because it was a great combo.

Prices continue to become more reasonable the further we get from St Moritz

I’d like to say we went out partying but I was asleep by 7pm and didn’t wake up until after 5am. I think the relief of having enough medication to make the trip enjoyable was such a great weight of my mind I could properly relax.

Our room at the hotel was nice too, spacious with a balcony lined with purple petunias.

Poor Luke was up until 11 playing games with his headphones in.

Tomorrow our last but longest day at 65km.

13Jun2023

Euro Bike Tour: Day 4: Scuol to Prutz (Crossing to Austria)

by Miss Penny Black

We left the hotel at about 10 after a bit of drama with my phone and Three, the company I got my phone SIM from. Danny, my friend in Northern Ireland (with whom I did the Camino) had been very kindly helping me out with renewing my phone plan (the money has to be paid from a UK account) but the credit he’d added had somehow disappeared while I’d been asleep – Luke thought maybe the hotel wifi had dropped out and apps had been updating. Luke used their online chat to fix it and the company renewed the plan for a month with unlimited data.

You just don’t realise how important internet access is until you don’t have it. We only have one UK phone number between us and it’s on my phone – something to rectify for next time. The delay made me feel a bit anxious as this was our longest day of cycling yet.

On the way out of Scuol was a very scenic bridge and no cars allowed, which makes any path more pleasant to ride!

So picturesque.

Snow melt makes the rivers such an unusual colour with all the minerals washed down from the mountains.

I didn’t take a lot of photos today. Switzerland has experienced really bad storms and some landslides. Trails that were probably fairly smooth a couple of weeks ago were very potholed and rough. Or maybe they were always like that. The day before we had been detoured due to a big landslide.

There were several parts of the ride early on where railings seemed to be missing or edges were more precipitous than they should be. I really don’t like coming down steep and winding gravel roads that have a sharp turn at the bottom and no railing or fence. It made me very tense and I’m surprised, after so much white-knuckled riding today that my arms and shoulders aren’t sore.

The other thing that was making me worried was that my most powerful and fast-acting hayfever medication is getting very low as the bottle has leaked a bit. I’d tried taking it in two half doses the day before with middling success but today I thought I’d wait until I felt the symptoms before I took it. With the wind in my face and a great deal of pollen in the air it didn’t take long for my eyes to become extremely itchy and feel swollen.

We stopped in a tiny hamlet and I felt really overwhelmed by the terrain and how my face felt. It was hard to see with such itchy red eyes and I had a bit of a cry. Luke tried calling the Eurobike help line to see if the bag transport vehicle was anywhere near us. It took them half an hour to get back to us and then they said no, the driver’s van was too full to pick us up.

We had deliberately booked through a company called Natural Adventures in order to avoid Eurobikes as their reviews weren’t good. It turned out that Natural Adventures use Eurobikes anyhow and that their promises of support to riders did not extend to picking us up, knowing anything about local transport services, connecting us to taxis etc or offering any help whatsoever.

After being the very definition of useless, the person at the other end had the temerity to say ‘have a nice day,’ and I replied with ‘unlikely,’ and hung up in a rage.

Since there was nothing for it, I took some of the remaining fast-acting hayfever meds, waited a bit and then kept going.

The next part of the path was pretty dreadful (short, steep, very rocky climbs and narrow paths next to steep edges) but eventually became a decent road which then turned into us riding on the side of a highway.

Initially we were on a bike path next to the highway but after some roadworks the bike lane disappeared and it was just us and cars and trucks all using the same lane. Fortunately due to the roadworks the traffic was slow and Swiss/Austrian drivers all moved over and were very polite. I didn’t feel in any danger and there were other cyclists on the road.

We had to ride through several tunnels. Partway through one I could see what I initially thought was my hair curling around the front of my hat, which was weird because I had put my hair in braids that morning. No, it dawned on me, it wasn’t hair, it was the legs of a huge beetle reaching under the brim of my hat right in front of my face. It was big enough for me to hear the thump as it hit the road when I brushed it off. Ick.

The highway riding was very fast (for us) – we rode between 30 and 40 kph for quite a while and made up for all the time wasted by the call to Eurobikes (world’s worst bike company?). After the highway the rest of the ride was along pretty quiet and well-sealed country roads through small villages until we reached our hotel.

Today’s ride was about 50km. Tomorrow is more like 35km and hopefully the high quality roads continue as we get closer to Innsbruck. The final day is 65km but if my hayfever is worse there’s a train line along that stretch so we can cut some of it out if needed.

Luke has been really supportive and kind about all my suffering and lets me set the pace and take rests when I need them. Technically I guess this is our honeymoon holiday since we’re on our own for a stretch and, even though it hasn’t been perfect, having Luke be so considerate with my challenges and severe discomfort at points has really reminded me what a wonderful human being he is and how lucky I am to have him.

Our hotel for the evening was on a busy road and didn’t look super fancy but the staff were really lovely and our room was a good size as well as having an enclosed balcony.

We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, where the food was easily half the price it would’ve been in St Moritz. We had pork schnitzels with cranberry sauce (a great combination) and they served wine in a 240ml carafe for 6€, which cheered me up even more.

We finished the evening drinking our duty free gin and watching from our balcony as the clouds changed colour and listening to music inspired by the restaurant’s playlist of 20 year old trance classics.

1Sep2018

A Day In The Cotswolds

by Miss Penny Black

Luke signed us up for a ‘Secret Cottage’ tour of the Cotswolds and so we arrived at Oxford station ready to catch a train to meet our group, only to find that, for the second time in a week, someone had been hit by a train and thrown the network into disarray. After hanging about for a bit a delayed train was rerouted and we jumped on and actually got to the meeting point a bit early.

We were met by two black vans and two drivers – ours was a local man named Jeremy who turned out to be an almost inexhaustible font of knowledge with a perfect BBC accent. He was the first (and probably the last) person I will ever hear using ‘one’ as an entirely unselfconscious personal pronoun.

Along with two girls from California who had arrived by the same train, we jumped in and were driven to a tiny village called Chastleton. There we admired a Jacobean manor which, up until quite recently, housed a lady who own 21 cats. Apparently the smell was quite something.

We also had a look in the church next door before heading around the corner to the ‘secret cottage’. The family who organise the tours live in the cottage and provide morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea throughout the day. Before eating we had a tour of the cottage.

Those mushroom shaped objects are ‘straddle stones’ used to elevate storage sheds so mice and rats couldn’t climb up.

It was originally three living spaces with families of up to 15 in each two room space. One room downstairs and one upstairs, reachable by a ladder. In winter the family pig and chickens would live inside too. These days it’s much nicer, with just four people living in the cottage rather than 45!

Morning tea was a delicious selection of biscuits and cakes.

On each excursion out we visited different villages in the Cotswolds and admired many thatched cottages and learned a great deal from Jeremy about the area’s history, geography, language, animals and social goings-on. For example, did you know that Patrick Stewart lives in the Cotswolds and writes many peeved letters to his local council about the shooting range near his property?

We visited Upper and Lower Slaughter – two gorgeous villages with rather dramatic names. However ‘slaugh’ meant ‘marsh’ in an old language, which makes it all less sinister. One of the villages is one of Britain’s ‘doubly thankful’ villages. This means that not one person was killed in either world war. Jeremy explained that the wars had quite devastating effects on some villages as all the young men would want to join the same regiment and so, if that regiment was in serious action, they could lose a generation in one blow.

We learned that while thatched roofs may be beautiful, they are also expensive. They cost about forty thousand pounds to restore (for a medium sized cottage) and a thatch last about 50 years. Some thatchers make signature animals along the roof line – often birds but sometimes cats, dogs and foxes.

Lunch!

The name ‘Cotswolds’ come from ‘cot’ meaning a fenced or enclosed space (from all the sheep pens) and ‘wold’ meaning ‘hills’.

A newly thatched cottage.

We saw a village named Great Tew that had been abandoned last century then revitalised when an heir to the estate had been found. It was a beautiful village filled with gorgeous buildings.

And a very cute pub!

Jeremy had worked as a geologist and as we walked through the village he found a brachiopod fossil!

It doesn’t look like much here but I could tell it was a shell, I promise!

He also had a little wallet of things he’d found while walking around the area, including a Roman coin. It’s the tiny blackened one.

Afternoon tea!

It was a lovely day. Not cheap, at £95, but it didn’t feel at all rushed and we had a very nice group of people to chat to, in fact four others from our group caught the same train back towards Oxford so we chatted the whole way. Lovely!