I’m gonna call this the Gnomesville trip, but reality is that’s where we finished.
I was fortunate enough to scam the passenger seat in Doc’s Patrol for a run down south of Perth today. We departed at around 0700h and headed to meet up at the Pinjarra bakery. It was a good place to start a trip, with plenty of parking space and a bloody good feed to boot!
After the obligatory meet & greets with a quick chat about the days proceedings, we departed and headed further south just past Burekup before turning east for a short while to the end of Lennard Rd. Unfortunately the start of our track coincided with the finish of a school children’s cross country event.
We aired down and came across the first obstacle for the day. A nice technical little piece all about wheel placement. The photos don’t really show the drop (they never do), but along with the dampness it was enough to require a tad more thinking & caution.
Trying to get a big number of vehicles through resulted in the inevitable delay in proceedings, but that’s the reality of large numbers. Not too much further up the track we stumbled upon an interesting bog hole, where a couple of young fellas were finishing a recovery. Only one of our group decided to give this a go, unfortunately not getting through.
Towards the later 1/2 it started getting a tad slippier and the safer options were taken but I’ll let the pictures tell the story. As per normal we always mention the more ‘spectator friendly’ parts of a track, but the reality is the track was full of little challenges which could come out to bite very quickly if your mind wandered.
The occasional break in the weather and surrounding bush provided some spectacular views across to the west. I could well imagine that on a good day you’d have no issue seeing the coastline. I could also understand quite easily that it would get very cold on an early winters morning up in these hills.
The last obstacle of the day was a relatively benign downhill section, however it was spiced up by the wet clay surface with no ruts to follow. The decision was made to bypass it as no-one was keen to go home with damage – and there was a good chance with 15 odd vehicles that the last through wouldn’t have much control.
The trip finished at a place called Gnomesville where there is some great displays of various gnomes added by a variety of people. There is everything from weddings to birthdays and memorials for people past. A great little place where there was even a touch of Tassie 🙂
A thoroughly enjoyable Sunday drive.