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Stirling Ranges

The next stop on my journey is Stirling Ranges National Park. It’s a unique and beautiful park full of incredible biodiversity. It’s a really interesting place. It’s surrounded by acres and acres of farmland, much of it yellow with canola flower. The farmland around it is generally quite flat, just a few rolling hills, but in the national park there are 6 major peaks and surrounding hills. To drive across the park north to south it’s only about 30 minutes, but that 30 minutes is full of incredible biodiversity. The 6 peaks are made of metamorphic rocks of quartz and shale making it extremely poor soil. This poor soil is one of the keys to the biodiversity of the region which allows for highly specialized plants. This small park has 87 endemic plant species, some found only on single mountaintops. It’s such a cool and unique place.  Quentin headed to Bremer Bay and decided to meet me here in a few days. The first day I was ambitious and climbed two mountains. Mt Hassel and Talyuberlup b
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Hopetoun and Ravensthorpe

  With only a few weeks left on my own in WA I headed to some areas I had hoped to return to visit before getting rained out when I drove across a few months back. I also heard from Quentin that we had quit his job and was on the road again so we touched base about returning to some places with the intention that we might travel in the same areas, but not always go to the same places. I was happy to travel with him, but also was looking forward to a bit of solo time after spending 3 weeks in the car with someone else. Not that it wasn’t great, I absolutely loved it, but traveling together the way we did we shared the car, tent, and room and we were never apart and I have been traveling by myself for quite some time now and it was definitely an adjustment. We both had wanted to go to Ravensthorpe which is famous for its annual wildflower festival and it was the last few days of the festival. There was a really great community hall filled with clippings of hundreds of local wildflowe
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Perth

  I got up slowly the next morning and rearranged my car to make it comfortable for one again. Its nice to have all my space back, although I do miss having someone to chat with on long drives. I checked out and headed into the city where I went to a beautiful park. The park had a Giant statue in it which matched the ones my mom and her sisters had just found in Washington. It was fun to have that little connection with them. I spent the afternoon relaxing in the sun, working, and just enjoying some alone time. That evening I got to spend a night in luxury as dad gifted me one of his rewards nights in a hotel in West Perth. It was so nice to have a quiet night of peace and solitude looking over the city. It was also perfectly located near Kings Park, an incredible botanical garden, and a car shop where I was able to get my brake pads replaced. I dropped off my car in the morning spent a couple hours walking through the park before returning to my hotel room with a late check out to w
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Swan Valley

  The next morning we got put and went to a new bakery before heading north back towards Perth and Swan Valley where we would spend our last night together. Along our drive we stopped at a conservation park, which is somewhere in between a zoo and a nature center. We were a bit skeptical when we first walked in though because the first exhibit we saw was guinea pigs. Just a pen full of guinea pigs and we were both like…. what are we doing here??? But we kept walking and it ended up being neat. The rest of the park was mostly Australian animals, although there wer also a lot of what appeared to be surrendered exotic animals as well. Most of them were clearly injured and likely unable to be return to the wild. We fed some geriatric kangaroos who had the cutest little faces full of wiry gray hairs, as well as some aggressive sheep, and a mule deer for some reason. There were so many different types of parrots and parakeets which were beautiful and some were able to say simple words like
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