Pics: Treetop walkway, Slender-billed Cockatoo, me in a tree
Cool and partly cloudy. Ate breakfast and cleaned up, said goodbye to Eugene and Eddie, and to Jody, and set off at ten. We cut across town to the scenic coastal route west. Our first stop was at Wilson Inlet at the town of Denmark. We were afraid it would look like Solvang, but it was instead a trim tiny seaside town. The White-winged Triller was a new life bird. We stopped a few more times, and then I insisted that we not delay getting to the Valley of the Giants National Park as it kept looking like rain.
We got to the park and got tickets for the Tree Top Walk, an amazingly well-engineered walkway that gradually climbs in swaying sections to 120 feet, so that shortly you are up in the tops of the Red and Yellow Tingle Trees, a type of very large Eucalyptus. Suddenly at the top of a dead snag we spotted the Slender-billed Black Cockatoo, a huge black parrot with a very large bill hidden in its fluffy black face feathers - a really dramatic sight that ordinarily we would have just glimpsed from the ground.
We returned to the Visitors’ Centre and grabbed the sandwiches we had brought and walked onto the Ancient Empire boardwalk through groves of enormous, buttressed trees. Al, a ranger, came and told us about the trees and efforts to save them, reduce salinity in the surrounding farm land and generally preserve the environment.
We had another 100 miles to drive so we set off through parkland and tree farms, finally reaching Pemberton, a small town in timber and wine country that looks pretty nice. I had selected a 2-bedroom chalet, called Blue Loft Cottages that turned out to be quite a ways out of town, in the middle of the woods across the street from an avocado grove. Very cute, brand new A-frame house with a loft bedroom up a spiral staircase and another bedroom down.
I cooked sautéed chicken with veggies and made mashed potatoes and we watched Austin Powers, pt 3.
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