Margaret River, Aug 2020
👩🦰 Birthday spoiling yaaaay! For Aaron’s birthday, I whisked him off to Yallingup down south. Yallingup is a beautiful little coastal town between the well-known popular tourist destinations Dunsborough and Margaret River, about 3 hours drive (250kms) south of Perth. Although lesser known, Yallingup is popular for its beaches, limestone caves, and close proximity to the wine regions and Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park.
On the way there we did a quick stop at Old Coast Brewery so Aaron could grab some quick roadies, which turned out to be ridiculously huge at almost a litre a can! Good thing Aaron is 1 million strong with ridiculously huge biceps to hold up the cans * insert joke about holding up my cans here *
I wanted dog friendly accommodation so we wouldn’t have to leave Smoosh behind, which was actually not as easy as I thought it would be. Finding somewhere that was good for dogs, in a nice location that didn’t look like a flea pit took a lot of Googling - mostly because I was also selfishly trying to find somewhere with a tub haha!
I found Petra Olive Oil Estate in Yallingup - not only was it dog friendly but the chalet and grounds looked absolutely beautiful. I was a bit slow deciding to book a place for the weekend and missed out on the king chalets with the tubs, so we booked Queen Chalet 2 instead. Here is Aaron (and Smoosh), errr…presenting the place:
We had some brekky overlooking the beautiful grounds and it was pretty special seeing heaps of roos just hanging around. Smoosh was very curious about the strange creatures. We took a wander in the grounds enjoying the beautiful sun, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves since it was off-season. Unfortunately that also meant that the tasting room and farm shop weren’t open, but I think that was a fair trade to make for feeling like we were the only ones there.
After our wander we were picked up for a wine tour - doggo friendly, of course! We went with Grape Escape Pawesome Tours and I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous, as Smoosh isn’t known for being very friendly to other dogs and is wary of new humans. But the tours are private so we had the mini van to ourselves and our driver was super lovely and very patient. They pick you up from your accommodation so you don’t have to worry about anything - except your dog behaving badly 😬
In hindsight, we just shouldn’t have brought Smoosh along as he is about as social as his Mumma i.e. not at all haha! He made us both anxious because there were other dogs around and people as well, but it went off pretty much without a hitch despite putting a bit of a dampener on the day - for me, anyway.
The boys both wore bowties and looked very handsome. Smoosh is such a lady killer (probably a bad choice of words 😖), but I've never heard so many 'aww he's so cute's in my life. Anyway, we hit up a few dog friendly wineries including Stormflower, Windance Estate, an amazing lunch at a very busy Black Brewing Co. and Cape Naturaliste. Definitely recommend the tour if you’re wanting to not leave your fur child behind (which you can’t do unsupervised in the Petra Olive Oil Estate accommodation). Aaron walked away with many liquid birthday presents too!
As if all that food wasn't enough, we grabbed dinner from Blue Manna, which was amazing! Aaron had baked oysters and a seafood linguine which were absolutely delicious. A great meal to end the short but sweet trip.