Tuesday, December 29

Today we drove through two national parks, Warren and Gloucester, which were very close to our B&B. Basically the area is surrounded by national parks, and there are over 600 in AU, compared to 40 something in the US. We were amazed to realize that we could simply stop the car, in the middle of the road, take all the pictures we wanted, and never have to worry about other cars coming by. We had been warned by lots of Bill's coworkers that over the Christmas holidays, the Margaret River area would be "crazy" with "tons of people," yet so many places were practically empty.

In Warren N.P. Bill climbed to the top of the Bicentennial Tree, over 200 feet tall. Although I started up it, I only went about 20 or 30 feet before realizing that if your foot slipped off the pegs, you would fall straight through, so I figured climbing it wasn't such a good idea after all. (Anyway, my back still hurt from the cave crawl of the day before, and that was as good a reason as any to back out.)

Bill took the second pic looking down from the lowest platform, not even half way up the tree.

The last photo was taken from the top, and the other is of Bill climbing up.