A few nights away from it all

It’s the last weekend of the school holidays and Lisa and I booked couple of nights in a hotel in the middle of the Karri Forests just an hour and half drive from our place. On the way we passed Nannup and dropped Elseya off at a good mate from dance, which meant that Lisa and I were for the first time in 14 years going to have a little holiday by ourselves:

The car was parked up and stayed there for 48hrs and the thought of not needing to drive was pure bliss. We had booked a lakeside room that had a balcony overlooking a reservoirs with tall karri tress along its banks. Miles from anywhere the place was quiet and peaceful, the trees had lights in them which gave us an amazing view at night:

As evening came we wandered to the restaurant, which of course also looked out over the water. We were armed with a room key and scrabble! The place had no Wi-Fi and better still no mobile reception so we really did manage to truly get away from it all. With scrabble on the go dinner time, which at home it usually a quick rush turned into a relaxing couple of hours:

Next morning we got the dice out before going down for breakfast, with nowhere to go and no plans we really slowed down. Well Lisa didn’t as she promptly got an unheard of five Yahtzee’s in a row giving her a whopping 726 point. Um time for breakfast I thought, where we this time took king cribbage along and yet again a meal time stretched way beyond an hour:

By the time we were back at the room it had turned and looked to be really setting in, so we put a film on and enjoyed another cup of tea. The day before I had suggested to go for a walk but Lisa wasn’t keen so I got her to pinky promise that if it was raining on the next day we would still go for walk:

So we headed out to see what we could see. The rain seemed to come and go and with the shelter of the trees it wasn’t too bad. The tracks were however sodden so by the end of it we had wet feet, but glad we had made the effort:

We walked round the reservoir so got glimpses of the hotel at various times. It was an hour’ish walk to go round but there was also an extra 45min trip to a walk-through tree. I was keen but Lisa not so much in the conditions so we left that for another time:

Half way round we came across a swing bridge over a Beedlup creek. Surprisingly Lisa was OK with walking over it, despite it’s very wobbly nature and height above the rushing water below:

From the bridge there was a great view of the Beedlup falls, but I couldn’t resist scrambling down the wet banks to get a better and closer view. We hadn’t met anyone else on the trail, no doubt the rain had put them off but in a way the wet weather made everything seem so much greener and fresh:

As we got close to the end of the walk the weather seemed to clear up and the water smoothed out making for some lovely views. The clouds didn’t part enough for the sun to poke it’s head out, so we didn’t hang about and headed back to our room to get changed and slob a bit more:

Seeing it has been so long since we have had a holiday like this we had a glass of bubbly to celebrate and watched another film and played some more Yahtzee. The evening drew on so we once more headed to the restaurant with the scrabble, and yet again Lisa beat me something that doesn’t usually happen:

Next morning was a bit clearer but it was also the day we had to head off, but before then we fed some parrots on the balcony, had a lazy breakfast with a game of king cribbage and chilled out. It was so easy to make a meal stretch out for a few hours here with such a relaxing view:

It was an amazing 48hrs and felt like soooo much longer than that. So when we picked Elseya up and headed home we were fully chilled out and now feel ready for next week when work, school and dance all kick off again:

I didn’t included these images above as it would have stretched on too long, but on the walk we did there were so many amazing fungi. Here literally is just a sample of the images I took: