Honeymoon Day 4: 19th December (Monday) – Hire Car to Yallingup

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So, it’s good-bye the Perth and the Pan Pacific hotel, as we jumped in the hire car and headed south to Yallingup. In Australian travel terms, it’s ‘just down the road’.

 
We set off immediately after brekky, once Ralph and I had picked up the car from Avis, located a short walk from the hotel. It’s a Nissan Xtrail 4 wheel drive auto with a very advanced comms system – speed camera detector, traffic congestion monitor, compass, and wireless connectivity to our mobile phones – super!

The Sat-Nav said around 3.5 hours for the 300km journey, but then threw a wobbly and positioned us in the middle of a field for the first 50kms or so. Luckily, we roughly knew the route, so it was all pretty straightforward (after a couple of pit-stops along the way) to ‘Seashells Yallingup’ . We arrived just after 3.30pm local time – about five hours after leaving Perth. There had obviously been some mis-communication between Trailfinders and here as they hadn’t received the request about a ‘top-floor apartment with a stunning view’. No matter, as they sorted us out with equivalent apartments located a floor lower. First impressions were good, with stunning designs and a high level of equipment – TV, Microwave, Washing machine, Dryer and Fridge.




It didn’t take us long to unpack and get global-communications set up : )

The views from our apartment were pretty good too – if you look carefully at the first picture below, ours is a sea-view (just!)

After unpacking, we all went for a short walk to the beach (around 15 minutes away). Meanwhile, the room technology was in rebellion! In Ralph and Karen’s, the washing machine was completely dead, whilst in ours, the door lock had experienced a nervous breakdown and was flashing an ominous orange light at us. Fortunately, the out-of-hours caretaker was on site to repair ours, but Ralph and Karen’s washing machine would stay asleep for another day.

At around 8pm it was off to the hotel next door to sample the menu. They say: trouble comes in threes, and our third ‘challenge’ was arriving at the hotel and trying to order some food! Apparently, it was the staffs’ Christmas Party and they had stopped serving food at 7.30 (it was now 8.15pm!). We expressed our displeasure, and the Bar staff dutifully wheeled out the Duty Manager to explain. All-in-all, he recovered it fairly well by offering us a limited menu (which happened to be the stuff we probably would have ordered anyway!). Service was brisk, and best of all, the food was tasty AND they let us have it all for free! Result!!!

Back to our room to find that the lock had been repaired too – things were looking up!

Tech Note: Although the internet is available here, it’s an eye-watering price, so I’ll be using the mobile broadband built into the NetBook whilst we’re here for the next three days.

Off exploring around Margaret River tomorrow…