Monday started out early – for some reason, none of us slept well during the night so we were all awake fairly early in the morning. John, Les and I decided to walk up the road to see if we could spot the kangaroos that John had seen on Sunday morning.

It wasn’t far before we saw a “herd” of them in a farmer’s field. They were grazing and keeping a wary eye out for anything that might disturb them.

We were all snapping photos when a single kangaroo started towards us – we kept expecting her to veer off but she came fairly close to the fence. We were excited to see that she had a joey in her pouch and didn’t seem to be in a big hurry to move away. She did start moving when the herd of cows which were in the same field came toward her though.

After such a great start to the morning, we decided to drive to Augusta which was on the Southern Ocean. On the way we stopped at a small town called Cowaramup – they have fiberglass cows all over town in various poses. Apparently, the town is known to locals as Cowtown so they decided to go with the theme. I think they should become a sister town to North Cowichan *g* While there, we visited the Margaret River Wine Centre and bought a bottle of wine to try.

Next stop was a small winery outside of Margaret River – The Berry Farm. They make preserves, jams, dressings, vinegars, ciders, fruit wines, sparkling wines, liqueurs and fortifieds. Nearly everything is out for sampling so we tried the jams, dressings and preserves and the fruit wines and liqueurs of course. We bought a bottle ofRaspberry No.2 wine and some Hazelnut Liqueur. It was a beautiful place and we enjoyed the tasting. While we were on our way back to the car, I finally managed to get a photo of a bird I’d been seeing but that didn’t ever seem to stay still long enough for a photo. It’s called a Splendid Fairy Wren.

Isn’t it beautiful?

After that we headed down the Bussell Highway to Augusta, only stopping to take photos and to pick up something for lunch. We found a beach on the Southern Ocean to eat our lunch – now we’ve seen the Indian Ocean (which is the ocean that our condo is located beside) and the Southern Ocean. After lunch and a stretching of our legs, we headed back to the condo via Caves Road. As we were driving along, we suddenly all yelled for John to stop the car – we had seen 3 kangaroos grazing and lazing at the side of the road. John turned the car around and Les and I jumped out to take some photos – we really expected them to run away as soon as we got out of the vehicle but they weren’t too interested in what we were doing. Les got a really good photo as he was this close:

We made it back to the condo at about 6 p.m. – a long day of driving but very enjoyable. We saw a lot of wineries (but didn’t sample at them – just marvelled at the landscaping of a lot of them.)

Tuesday will be a lazy day – time for a little r and r.