Jarvis Estate and Christmas 2015/2016

Jarvis Estate

Once again we travelled south, but, thankfully not too far.
We are staying here on the Jarvis estate winery for about 8 weeks, looking after the vines and 2 dogs whilst the family go on their well earned holiday to Europe. After some discussion with Matt (the owner) we found the perfect place to site our caravan, we chose a spot next to some beautiful vines and with a great view of the evening sunsets.....
The winery was home to two back packers who were sharing a cabin near the house and not to far from us. Denis (who was from Belgium) and Laura (from Germany) who were working for Matt and also the nearest Cellar door became really good friends. We ate with them on numerous occasions. Laura, did leave though, just before Christmas to travel to Melbourne seeking other adventures.

Ella, the Merrema (Italian sheep dog) she is beautiful

Christmas time

I think its the only Christmas that I have actually been organised so early, food ordered, tree up, presents wrapped.... We had a great time with our family.

Uncle Jon is here to pick me up!

A number of visits were obviously taken to various wineries and a few Friday nights to the local Colonial Brewery for their special offer of $10 pizzas, as some of you may know we have never been fans of pizza but these were very good! Must be the price!!
Lots of presents to open, in fact, we too our time and or grandsons opened present on Boxing day and the day after...
I think the presents of the Jackets with the Cleethorpes printing on them went down very well, ha ha.
Some photos of our Christmas together!

Thomas is the best, but, how do I get him home?

Big boys bike

My first scooter

Milk shake at the local park

Toby and his ice cream at the local park, what a mess!

Our little "Fish"

Caravan Park swimming pool, we couldn't get him out!

Hamelin Bay, such an amazing beach

New fleece jackets, from Cleethorpes Surf shop

Jackets on

We felt so blessed that we could have our grandson Kyan with us for a weeks stay but everything comes to and end ad Jon and Kyan left us on 3rd January, a few tears were shed. 

The famous Cleethorpes Surf & Sun Jackets

Jenni, Tom and Toby stayed until 9 January, Richard drove them back to Perth but, unfortunately, the journey was via a very big detour as at this time, WA experienced one of the worst bushfires ever. They arrived in good time and Richard travelled back to Margaret River, the route being a long one, all in all an unbelievable long day.

Memories...

South Western Australia

After all our jobs being completed, we left Perth and travelled down towards our next house sit, but we had planned to see a few places on the way.
Our first stop was a small bush type camp on a beach and estuary access, called "Herron Point" off the Forrest Highway , very quiet with no power but had a toilet block. Many of the caravanners were hooked on finding the local delicacy, "Blue swimmer crabs". We decided to stay for 3 nights and enjoyed a few walks on the beach and also managed to relieve ourselves of our old washing machine......to those who don't know the story! we have been carrying a brand new 3kg washing machine around with us for 6 months and we finally got it fitted whilst the caravan was having its service. Richard had tried 3 times to remove the old washing machine but had no luck, so the amazing people at PDF caravans in Maddington Rd Perth took pity on us and fitted our new one all for the princely sum of $85, cheap as!!

 

 



From Herron Point we had a drive and a walk around Mandurah, our first time here and it is one really beautiful place. We thought the town and the water area was amazing, we had a lovely lunch somewhere along the waterfront. Most of the properties here in Mandurah have their own water front access where a boat can be moored, oh to be rich!!

 



After Heron Point, we moved on down the coast to the beautiful town of Busselton. This is a tourist town with much new development and has an amazing old jetty with an under sea aquarium at the end of it. We have visited before and will also be staying here in a few months time with Bill and Diane Bacon ,and Pam Moore. We will save a few strolls along the jetty for when they join us!

We stayed at a church campsite on the "Holy Mile" area of Busso. This part of Caves Rd has many Church camp grounds that are situated right on the beach. They are owned and run by various religious groups. We chose the Anglican site as it had been recommended and luckily they had room for us we had a 50 metre walk to the beach from our caravan, superb this site also had brand new ablutions block and all for $25 per night. Wonderful!

We had lovely neighbours and one of them kindly offered us their inflatable canoe enabling us to have a paddle in the calm still ocean, the beach here is so spectacular, perhaps we might buy one of these canoes?



Before leaving Busselton, Helen scoured the town and found a superb hairdresser and had the full works before we left for our house sitting experience on the 3rd December.

More to follow!!

Gidgegannup, House Sit, October 2015

Easy short tow to our next address, the entrance was a little narrow for our van but we managed all good.
House sitting was a totally new experience for us, we had spoken to some people who had done it and the general opinion was that it can be a very rewarding exercise.
This property was a large rural lifestyle block of 10 acres. We were met by the eldest son of Cheryl and Stephen (the owners) who helped with the caravan, positioned and levelling of the van well before his parents arrived home.






We only had this evening and tomorrow to get to know and into the swing of what our duties would be before the family went off on their travels. Before and after dinner both of us went around the garden with Cheryl, her showing us where the chicken house etc was. The family had a lovely dog called "Bitsy" and three beautiful cats. These animals were not our responsibility we were told. Michael, Cheryl's eldest son would feed them, he is staying home!

The most important duty would be to keep the chickens, ducks and turkeys happy and collecting their eggs, which I can tell you now were abundant!! We were going to do a lot of watering of the trees and veggie garden too.
In the garden were various fruit trees, the lemon tree was just full of fruit and because of so many eggs Helen made a few jars of Lemon Curd/honey, which tasted amazing due to the fact of the freshness of the produce!
While we are here and settled for a few weeks, Richard, will be doing some maintenance on the caravan. We want to have an extra solar panel on the roof and get the caravan booked in for wheel alignment as Rich has a concern about one caravan tyre. This was all organised and solar panel bought and fitted within the first two weeks.


The days and weeks seemed to pass very quickly, especially when we were busy with our duties.  Bitsy would be Richard's companion all of the time here.

Bitsy

We did have a trip out along a scenic drive which was off Toodyay Road and very pleasant it was apart from a small downpour which wet some of the inside of the caravan, that was our fault for leaving the tops open.
Pictures of the scenic lookout we visited.


The colour red in the middle of the picture
 is a long train travelling eastwards

 

   

  

The weather during our house sit was very good with some really hot days and some nice weekends with Jon and Kyan being able to visit and all of us using the beautiful pool. 

This day in particular was very hot and the pool was so welcoming, we were very lucky to have it.

 





 

Richard learned that an ex colleague, of his from Grimsby, Helen, lives quite close by so we made a date to catch up with her in the Hotel at Mundaring. In fact we managed to see her twice during our stay here.

We had been told about the town of Toodyay (pronounced Too-jay) which is about 52kms away from us and encouraged to take a trip to look at the Christmas shop and the Coca Cola Café. We found a sign directing tourists to a Lookout point so this was our first view of Toodyay..

This town is so lovely we had a stroll up and down the main street following an historic path, with a number of plaques explaining about the town. A coffee was had in the Coca Cola Café with lots of photographs being taken.

Toodyay Hotel

Coca Cola Café

 

 
 

 

During the month we did get out and about, Helen did most of the food shopping in Mundaring a beautiful little town that had everything one would need and approximately 45 mins from Perth. Richard had the job of taking Kyan to a very big event Monster Jam in the city and did the travelling by train and Helen picked both of them up at Midland Station again only a 20 minute drive from the caravan.

We even caught up with friends for lunch at Mindarie Marina. We had met Caron and Pete way back along the Stuart Highway and then Wendy and John relatively recently in Carnarvon and it turned out they had all met up while searching for wildflowers here in WA. We had a great lunchtime catch up!! the men chatting about caravan trivia, mainly toilets!! Sorry we were all too talkative and forgot to take photographs!!

 

We were able to have Kyan for a few nights  and he loved feeding the chickens and having some time with the horses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



We had not seen any of our relatives whilst being in the area of Perth and one Sunday we did manage to have a few over for a late lunch... It was a warm day too and we decided to eat under the large patio area of the house where there was fans!  A great way to see our relatives.







Another friend of ours, David, from the UK was over visiting his daughter and his grandchildren, we were so pleased to have them at the caravan for lunch. But again, no photographs!! The same evening our friend Helen and partner Chris visited us. Why did we leave all our entertaining to just one weekend!!

Soon the family were home, they had been to the USA and had a great time. Plans were soon in hand for some of the family to enter items to the Gidgegannup show on Saturday 31st.
Richard and I had a really interesting time at the show we spent over 4 hours there before getting back and finishing off our packing of the van. Tonight we had been invited to a family BBQ and a very good time was had with the family and other family members.


We left and travelled back to the caravan park "Back to Nature" where we will stay for a while and then leave the van in storage as we will be in Jon's house for two weeks.

Our next journey will be on 24th November to a caravan park near where we have to get the van for a service. Our next port of call will be somewhere towards the Margaret River area!!