Morawa > New Norcia
Heading out of Morawa in the morning things were fairly straightforward, involving a day's leisurely drive towards an evening stop at New Norcia, with a few pauses to look at whatever wildflowers were out along the way, and that's how it panned out.
Stops along the way to check out the wildflower intelligence weren't as successful as they might have been, and while I don't mean to cast aspersions on the people (presumably volunteers) who look after the tourist info, they don't always pay too much attention to where you've been or take account of the vehicle you're driving.
A case in point. We stopped in Perenjori, having come from Morawa, answered the inquiry about where we'd been, described our destination, mentioned that the hire car people weren't enthused about having their vehicles travel off the bitumen (no insurance cover if you did and something unfortunate happened) and asked about the possibilities.
The response was a complicated briefing that would’ve taken us along a confusing array of dirt roads in search of a small array of orchids in a location identified by the presence of a blue sock.
And we'd have been heading back towards Morawa, rather than south towards New Norcia.
While we listened patiently, nodding sagely, and thanked the lady for her advice, once we were back in the car we were off towards Carnamah and Coorow with the possibility of lunch in the back of our minds. Neither township seemed to have much on offer in the eating department, so we continued south towards Moora, planning to call in to the Wildflower Farm to the north of town, where the information brochure suggested lunch might be a possibility.
The Wildflower Farm, once we'd found our way inside, proved to be an interesting operation in a number of ways. The entrance wasn't all that clearly identified (or maybe we were just in the wrong part of the car park) and we found our way inside thorough the entrance that provided access from what were obviously the proprietors' living quarters, to be greeted by the owner, who showed us around the processing part of the operation (fairly impressive, they apparently have an extensive export market), offered us a cup of tea or coffee in what looked like the eating section of the establishment, and left us to go about her regular routine out the back.
The woman who looks after the front of house arrangements cheerily delivered the refreshments and didn't act as if payment was required, so we sat undisturbed for a spell with a specially commissioned Leyland Brothers documentary about Western Australian wildlife played out in the background at a relatively high volume level.
Inquiries about lunch brought an I'll see what I can do and the end of the Leyland Brothers DVD produced a welcome silence, interrupted by the return of Madam Proprietor, who volunteered to put it back to the start so we could watch the rest of it and advised that the catering only operates for coaches.
Oh well, Moora was just down the road and we'd be sure to find lunch there.
Madam ended up with an impressive bouquet of preserved banksia and wildflowers, which I regarded as a dubious prospect in the Will It Get Back Safely To Bowen Stakes and we set off for Moora around a quarter to two, with Hughesy not at all confident of finding something still open with lunch on hand.
A check at the tourist information pointed us towards the pie shop, which boasted a restaurant as a side operation, but we arrived to find that side of things was about to close, and the pie warmer substantially depleted at the end of what had presumably been a busy day’s trading. Still, there was a meat pie and a vegetable pasty and they sufficed to get us along the rest of the route to the evening stop in Australia's only monastic town, New Norcia.
There aren't many settlements scattered across this portion of the Westralian countryside, so finding somewhere between Morawa and Perth where we could spend the night before continuing to Busselton was something of a problem.
Originally Madam had come up with a farmstead B&B property, and we should have known something was up when all attempts to make an actual booking seemed to draw a blank. Eventually I phoned at the right time (the place is a working farm, so the proprietors are usually out and about somewhere away from the phone) and was advised we don't do that stuff any more, sorry. There seemed little else available except for the hotel at New Norcia, so that was where we were headed.
Madam also had ambitions regarding New Norcia bread, but complications set in. For a start you don't buy the bread from the bakery, which is part of the monastery and therefore off limits to the general public. You can buy it at the roadhouse or an outlet at Scarborough Beach.
Predictably the roadhouse had sold out, and enquiries revealed that Tuesday was the baker's day off, so no joy for the morrow either.
We also went looking for it in the shop at the museum, a search that brought back spooky memories of a very much younger Hughesy's regular visits to reclaim the football that had found its way onto the wrong side of the ten foot fence that surrounded the Carmelite nunnery behind the house where my family lived in Auchenflower.
The flashbacks continued after we'd checked into the hotel and found a room that existed in a sort of late-fifties time-warp (or early sixties, it bore a remarkable resemblance to the rooms we found upstairs at the old Queens Hotel on the Strand when my family moved to Townsville in 1963). Fortunately the time warp included electric blankets.
We were downstairs for dinner fairly early in proceedings since breakfast and lunch had been rather thin on the ground, but the New Norcia dinner made up for that, with a couple of glasses of the monastic wine and samples of the Abbey Ale to wash down a beef and Guinness stew and a remarkably good pizza. With that out of the way, however, there wasn’t much that was going to delay the retreat to the cot.
And, of course, the electric blanket.