Monty's Travels: Margaret River Area

Today we spent the day traveling around the Margaret River Area. It is an area of small towns, excellent wineries, a chocolate factory, a nougat factory, shopping (of course), beautiful vistas, and even a silk worm farm.

We started this morning in the town of Margaret River for breakfast at Morries. We had a nice breakfast and

enjoyed the pressed metal tiles on the walls and ceilings (we call them tin ceilings).

Margaret River is a nice town full of shops and eateries. Here are a few pictures from the downtown area.

Lovely parks,

Shopping malls

And stores along the street

Off the main street but within the downtown district is a more conventional Mall. The main store is Woolworth’s.

This rose was in one of the city parks.

One of our first stops was at Silk Road, which is Australia’s first commercial silk farm. The farm is about five years old. It produces its own silk worms and cacoons. It takes time to be fully productive, so they are working in cooperation with silk farmers and weavers in Cambodia. The Cambodian silk farmers use the silk cacoons from Silk Road along with their own to make silk thread and then weave the thread into products. We learned about the live cycle of the silk worm while there.

The owners raise their own worms from eggs. They are growing Mulberry trees in green houses, so they have a constant supply of food for the worms. Below, are some of the worms feeding on mulberry leaves.

When the worms are fully grown, the then spin the cocoon. It is from the cocoon that the silk comes from. Below is a picture of the cocoons ready for thread pulling.

Each cocoon has a fine single strand that is combined with 4 to 5 other strands to create the silk thread. Below is a raw and finished hank of yarn along with a typical woven end product.

A view of their product show room.

Our next stop was at the local Chocolate Factory. They product their own white, milk and dark chocolate and end products.

This is a view into the chocolate manufacturing room with white chocolate on the wheel.

In the show room were stacks of various kinds of bars and truffles. They had a small restaurant. Here are a some of the deserts that were available…..all locally made of course.

After lunch we drove over to the small community of Gracetown on Cowaramup Bay to look at the Indian Ocean. Although partly cloudy with a few rain showers in the area we had a nice time watching the waves and surfers.

The result of a prevailing wind.

We had to include this picture of a couple of the roads we have been traveling on. No, this picture is NOT printed backwards!

We finished the day with a visit to a nougat factory and of course a stop at Millers Ice Cream Shop for a scoop. The ice cream was as excellent as it looks in this picture.