cow town

We wake to rain.  A cyclone has come ashore north of Perth and is tracking across SW Australia.  We get the tail end of it.  Fortunately that’s all we get.

We’ve decided to give Matilda a couple of days off.  The back roads of Margaret River twist and turn and many are only partially sealed.  It’ll be hard work on Matilda as well as us, so we decided to hire a small car for a couple of days.

On the way to pick up the car we stop for breakfast at the small town of Cowaramup, know locally as Cow Town.  It seems that as well as timber mills and wineries, Margaret River is also cattle country.  

Cow Town is famous for its herds of friesians - the animate variety as well as the inanimate.  Dotted around town are 42 live-sized cows and calves.  But Cow Town’s love affair with their bovine friends goes deeper than that; a couple of years ago 1352 people dressed in cow costumes to claim a world record for the most people dressed as cows ……. 

We decided to visit a local chocolate factory as an alternative to being blown out to sea on the clifftops; so does every other family in Margaret River.  It’s packed as people seek an indoor distraction from the rain.  Sugar-high kids, their mouths and pockets filled with free samples, charge up and down the ‘factory’.  

It’s all a big con; it’s just an enormous shop filled with every form of chocolate product imaginable.  There’s a small window at one end with a view into a room where people are supposed to be working; it’s empty - presumably all staff have been redirected to the tills to cope with the queues waiting to pay for their chocolate goodies.  They’ll probably pay for it in other ways later.

If I sound a bit detached from all this, I am.  I’m the only person in the building, apart from the staff, not eating chocolate,  I lost a filling last night and have a gaping hole which I do not want to fill with sugar.  Boo.

The cyclone leaves a parting gift; a power cut wipes out the local area.  Luckily we have some sandwiches left over from lunch and the others will survive on chocolate souvenirs.

ps: RIP Terry Pratchett.  You really made me laugh.