Margaret River

Still searching for cooler weather we continued further south and after a lovely week at Busselton, which I'd visited in 2008 with Danni, we eventually ended up in the Margaret River region - an Australian wine and food paradise.

Even before selecting a camping spot the first stop of the day was breakfast ... the most dog friendly cafe we could find was Sails Too and it turned out to be a good find with very reasonable prices and excellent friendly wait staff.

This yummy spread of pork sausages with onion jam and perfectly cooked poached eggs really set me up for the day.
Levi approved as well.

My brother James recommended the Big Valley Farm campsite, only 7km from the town of Margaret River and it turned out to be a real find and very reasonably priced.

Kevin the owner of the working sheep farm campsite is probably the friendliest and most helpful campground host I've ever encountered. He marked the nicest spots to visit including best price for fuel (12 cents a litre less than in town) and even repaired my spare wheel carrier by welding on missing parts.

There was a real mix of guests - about 50/50 grey nomads and young folks from many different countries. The youngsters spent most of their time in the excellent camp kitchen which had every appliance you could think of, although they usually sat chatting till around 10pm, they were not at all noisy and in fact us grey nomads probably made the most noise :-)

Happy hour was a a big feature at this campsite and each evening we gathered at different vans and enjoyed an hour or two of great company and different goodies from around the region, including sheep cheese, various venison small goods and chocolates.

Bill, a retired cane grower from far North Queensland had a very successful day fishing and we enjoyed the fruits of his labour smoked with bush herbs.