a brief kiki moment

WARNING: this is a post about my cat.
Stop reading now if you're not a fan of cats in general, my cat or me talking about my cat.




I have to admit that I  harbour crazy cat lady tendancies.

I spend vast amounts of time at icanhascheezeburger.com laughing at pictures of cats doing dumb stuff with captions that someone has made up.
I am convinced that my own cat, Kiki, has an internal monologue that is the same as these captions.

So it should come as no surprise that I very much miss my Kiki the naughty kitteh as we travel around the country.
I've taken to stalking every cat I see for a pat - I almost had to miss the royal wedding last week for some cat patting at the caravan office we were staying at.
They wouldn't let me take the cat to the TV room. Rude.

Kiki is a very small (only 3kgs), brown burmese. She's lived indoors with us in Sydney for the last thre and a half years and she could be describes as a crazy cat.

This is a cat who likes to sit in boxes, likes to eat holes in all your socks, likes to get to the very most highest places she can in the house.

Originally we had intended to bring her along - I had done much research on caravanning with cats on board and it seemed possible.

It was going to be the Cat-avan of courage.

But it wasn't possible for our kitteh cause she's far too sociable and there was warranted fears from her vet that she could be traumatised by the constant moving and/ or, run away.

So Kiki has been having a vacation of her own with Husband man's brother, sister in law and their two young daughters.

When good people have done a spot of cat sitting in the past, she's got up to all sorts of mischief.

This is the cat that once chewed the ends of every single pen in a big bowl of random things that my friend Melissa had on her bench top. 

She and her husband man discovered this about 2 weeks after she had left their care. 
All of their pens had little chew marks on them - because our trixy little kitteh had put them all back in the bowl - under things - and so covered her tracks until she'd left the house.

In this same mini-break Melissa woke one morning to find that Kiki had collected all her elastic hair bands from around the house and lined all 20 of them up at the bedroom door, as some sort of offering.

Weird much?

By all accounts at her new place she's been having just as great a time.

Kiki is getting carted around in the dolls pram, carried in shopping bags, being dressed up (having met her trixy match in my nieces), hiding in cupboards, chewing on moving boxes and sleeping in the many sunny spots around the house.


Not even missing me at all.
Not even one bit.


And especially not missing me now as she explores the great OUTDOORS...!


Yes.
For those of you that know Miss Kiki - you know her as an indoor cat.
But now that she lives in the country, she's been given some space and an open door to explore things like grass and trees.


For years birds have been prancing on the windowsills tormenting her with their butts against the glass, knowing that she couldn't get out and chase them.


Not anymore.


Now she's doing the low crouch butt wiggle attack on them. A mission always spoilt by her clanging big old collar bell.


To prove she's still alive - our sister in law (bless) sends pics of Kiki the naughty little kitteh. Here are some of her escapades while we've been away.

Pram time with my niece.

First attempts at grass.

Yes, on the roof! Had no bright ideas for getting herself down and had to be rescued by Husband man's brother via ladder.

Obviously she's not lost any of her chutzpah in this last 2 months and remains a picture of innocence at the end of the day.

Van Morrison: Magic Time

So we're here in Western Australia.

IN fact, today we visited the most south-westerly point in the whole of Australia down at Cape Leeuwin - where the Indian ocean meets the southern ocean. Not that you can see where they meet. There isn't a big old line pointing it out or anything. Pretty much looks like more of the same windy ocean you see anywhere.

But whatever.

You can imagine that we are very much at the edge of the earth.

The good thing about being at this particular edge of the earth is that we're surrounded by the wine of the Margaret River region.

To get here - we've been travelling through the south-west of WA.
Coming off the Nullarbor, we headed straight to Esperance and out the Cape Arid National Park. It was quite seriously the best bush camping you can probably do in this country (big call) and we had a great time. There's a whole lot of pics from there in the post below.

Then we spent about 4 days in Esperance.
I have to admit that I had been looking forward to Esperance for a very long time.
It fit all my criteria for choosing a location - good sounding name (like schweppervesence), close to nice beaches and not like a mega city.

But Esperance should actually have the word 'Port' in front of it,because the refinery and the overcast weather we had, really spoilt the vision I had conjured up in my head.

That said - everything around Esperance was amazing, it was a a very good base for getting to Cape le Grande National Park (50kms away), a number of stunning beaches and some damn good bogan spotting.

Check out this little gem - Twilight Beach:

Once at Esperance we stayed at a caravan park about 3kms out of town. It is easter holidays, so this was our first sort of encounter with people who put hang about in tents.
People OUR age!!

Except, that the tent people clearly don't like to talk to the caravan people. There was also a good collection of people who play their music too loud and let their annoying children run about the place unattended.

Sound like i've become a 65 year old much?

Well it gets worse.

I've been drinking wine from a cask, Husband man has been buying slabs of beer cans and we've been walking around outside the van in ugg boots.
So not only have we aged 35 years, we're also assimilating with our bogan surrounds.

This is worrying.

In between all this weird behaviour, we've been seeing awesomeness in WA.

Let's start with Cape le Grande. Here we drove and walked around each of the bays...

Lucky Bay:

Thistle Beach:



And then we decided it was time to hike our sorry arses up Frenchman's Peak, which not suprisingly, was named by the French.

The tourist guides said that this spot provides commanding views of the Esperance region, in particular the dazzling beauty of Cape Le Grand National Park and the 110 islands of the Recherche Archipelago.

It stands at 262 metres above sea level.

And we climbed it in bare feet.

Not that we intended to climb it with bare feet, it's just that we'd gone to all the beaches in our thongs (flip flops).

I was also wearing a dress. Which made for interesting conversations on the way up the almost vertical cliff face with foreigners exlaiming 'where are your shoes?!' as though we were some kind of lunatic.

As though we hadn't noticed that we weren't wearing any shoes.

Thank you helpy smurfs.

We were at one with nature, okay.

We were all instinct and primitive.

Kinda like our friend Ben, who climbed Machu Pichu in South America in thongs cause he wanted to look cool. But now he has to wear compression stockings on plane trips, which is clearly the antithesis of looking good.

On top of having no shoes, I was also wearing a loose summer dress.

Obviously climbing mountains is not an expected part of one's day when island living!

Here's me schlepping it on an incline:

Yeah!

I do have to say that toes have awesome grippage.



As promised, the views from the top were spectacular and there is this kind of cave like hollow that is also a great look-out, even though a mere photograph will not do it justice...

And then we had to climb down, barefoot and me in a dress trying not to flash unsuspecting tourists.

I am pretty sure that on that particular day, we were more of an attraction and will be in more memories of the climb up that mountain for everyone that saw us. All those, special shoe wearing proper travellers were beside themselves.

Then we caught some sunset at le Grande beach, our first of western sunshine setting over the waters...

We left Esperance and headed west to Albany, a gorgeous little ex-whaling town.

We stayed at Middleton beach, which was perfect for watching young Kate Middleton get married to Prince William. 

I visited Whale World and Husband man set about cathing us some dinner at a place called Salmon Holes. Name gives it away really:

Don't mind the shirt, Husband man doesn't usually get about sporting bogan beer brands across his chest. This was picked up as a freebie from a nice man at a liquor store at Streaky Bay in South Australia.
It was intended as a fishing shirt never to be seen. But clearly it brings luck and dinner and therefore warrants a special guest appearance.

As we headed toward Margaret River - we entered some beautiful rainforest/ national park area.

We walked amongst the tree tops 40 metres high at Tree Top Walk in Valley of the Giants near Walpole and then Husband man climbed the 60 metre Gloucester tree. Nutter.

A little way down the road was an outdoor art gallery, where a bunch of folk have put up some installation art along a path in the national park.

Here's my favourite - an oversize feather floating in the space between the trees.

And now we find ourselves at the Margaret River - lording it up on a sunny Tuesday, wine tasting our way around the surrounds.

Husband man's workplace gave him the farewell gift of a night at a lovely retreat.

In protest, Van Morrison's electrics short fused the Hilux on the way into town. Another trip to the van doctor for us.

So I'll leave you with this pic of Husband man at Hamelin Bay - where the sting-rays come up to your feet for you to feed them.

Western Australia is, so far, sensational.

Cape Arid... just quietly!

Arriving at Esperance, Western Australia on the eve of Good Friday is not a great idea.

This place is packed with Easter holidaying families and there isn't a nook of availability in town for camping, caravaning or sleeping.

We could get a booking on the Sunday, but not a moment before.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It forced us to do some 'free-camping' at Cape Arid National park.

Admittedly, our first choice was Cape le Grande National Park, 50kms east of Esperance (a hot tip from nomads met in Robe, John and Linda) - but it was already full up with campers when we got to the turn-off sign at lunch. 

So we drove another 120kms east to try our luck with Cape Arid. And we got the 2nd last free camp spot there.

How is this for a front door view from Van Morrison:

We camped here with Morrie and about 30 other people scattered around for 3 days and it was just absolutely STUNNING.

The beaches are the most beautiful white sand, the water aqua and salty, the sunsets were very pretty and the sunrises are worth getting up for.

We spent the days doing long walks, swimming, chasing an emu and soaking up the sunshine.

So please, be patient while I indulge in a little picture blog post - because there really isn't anything more that I can say to try to describe the beauty of the stunning Cape Arid....

Sunrise on the first day, mist over Yokinup bay.

Dolphin Cove

Tagon Beach

Sunset at Yokinup Bay.

Okay, now please enjoy this sun rising on our last day with me.

It's amazeballs!

We're off to a good start Western Australia...