Australia Part Three

Tuesday morning, Laura and I left Perth in search of better things. We drove 3 hours south to Margaret River. MR is known for it's wine (woot!). Happily, our hotel was much nicer, even romantic! With 20 or so rooms, all named after different types of wine, it was a fun set up. Laura and I had an awesome dinner and bottle of wine at Wino's. Wednesday we drove further south, stopping at Mammoth Cave, and Leeuwin Lighthouse, and the beach! On Thursday we took an all day winery tour, where we met lots of fun people, lead by our fun tour guide, Silvano, and his friend, the grub, George. We decided to bite the bullet and purchase some wine and attempt to bring it back to Japan. On Friday, we drove back north to Perth, and spent hours waiting around at the airport, returning the car, and not reporting the damage. (I backed into a pole in the parking lot of our hotel in Perth. But the rental agent gave me a form that someone else had already filled out to mark the damage on the car. She had me cross out his signature and sign next to it. The previous signer had marked a scratch right where my scratch appeared. And I let the rental agency deal with it instead of paying $3,000...) We had to do some sweet-talking to the airlines agent to get our overweight baggage (3 bags, plus a case of wine - more than 23kg/50lbs). But apparently she'd had good experiences with some of the navy guys and made some calls to get our wine aboard - yay! Laura was a really great travel buddy, a really great planner, and a lot of fun to be with. This is a good thing since we spent 5 days 24/7 together! After the longest bus ride from Narita to Zama, and the help of Kelly to get from Zama to Atsugi, we parted ways and finally got home.