Sittin' On Top of the World

Caught a wave, and I sat on top of the world. I tell you what, there are only a few things as exciting as surfing in this world.This past weekend on our last trip we found ourselves down in Margaret River. We left early Friday morning for Margaret River. On the way down we stopped at a mine of sorts and learned about what they do. Apparently they mine or something... I don't actually remember what kind of mine it was, but it consisted of a lot of holes in the ground, crushing up of ore, and picking it up out of the other rock by a gigantic magnet. Then we continued on to Margaret River to meet the town planner who told us all about Margaret River. Just so you know how exciting this was, he talked to us about the parking problems they are having... It was actually minimally interesting and I came away with a feeling of what Margaret River people are like.

We started off Saturday with a canoe guide up Margaret River beginning at the river mouth. Chris was our guide and he was definitely your stereotypical Australian. He was grayt. Canoeing is always a good bit of fun and we learned some history, heard some stories and went crawling through a little crawl space in a small cave. The guide gave us some bushtucker-food native Aboriginals would eat for sustenance-to eat before going for a swim in the refreshing river water. At the end of the tour we had a little bit of a race between all the canoes for a bottle of wine. With the help of another canoe, we were able to paddle to victory for the 2007 Redgate Chardonnay. As you can see there was one group that paddled in the Tippecanoe...

Then we left the river to go see a sweet cave. It was big, beautiful, and the water was some of the purest in the world. It was delicious...
Saturday also marked presentation day. In order to get our 1 credit for these trips, we had to give a group presentation in regards to a given theme and how it related across the three destinations. An aside: I didn't actually make a post for the second one because I was busy doing the backpacking ones. It was back down to Denmark and Albany right where we were hiking, so there wasn't too much new anyway. Back to Saturday: We gave our talk on nature and then we went to bed.

Sunday was awesome. We had to get up at six, but it was totally worth it for the surfing. The guy taught us how to get up and surf, but when it actually came to the water I just forgot everything he said and hopped up my own way. It worked wonderfully and before I knew it I was riding some 4 m swells... Unfortunately the waves weren't actually that big, so I mainly stuck to the white wash waves because that's all there were for the most part. The real waves weren't very big and I could actually get up on those just fine as long as they weren't crashing right on top of me as I tried to get up... The falls feel pretty good. I highly recommend surfing to you all. Maybe we can all take on the mighty Atlantic together...
Then from surfing we went on to wine tasting at Vasse Felix. It all tasted really good as far as I'm concerned. We tried three whites and three reds. Unfortunately they do not give tours of the facility on Sundays so we were left with only the wine tasting and a light lunch before getting back on the bus and heading home. We stopped at an Aboriginal heritage center along the way and made it home by 9 30. And so ends the trip to Margaret River, by far the best of the three trips.