December 22 - December 27

Launceston to Melbourne
Virgin Blue 603
Departs Monday, Dec. 22 - 10:00 AM
Arrives Monday, Dec. 22 - 11:00 AM

Melbourne to Perth
Virgin Blue 291
Departs Monday, Dec 22 - 1:15 PM
Arrives Monday, Dec 22 - 3:30 PM

Things to see and do:

Wines for Dudes
Fremantle Prison

Monday, December 22

Monday was a looooooong travel day. We left the cabin about 5:30 to return to Launceston for the first of two flights today. We're flying to Perth via Melbourne on Virgin Blue. We get to the airport and discover (I think we were too tired on the flights in) that security is pretty lax in Australia. We never have to show anyone photo ID and while they talk about liquids and gels, they don't actually ask you to remove them when going through security.

Virgin Blue offers no free refreshments yet seem to do plenty of business selling food on the short one hour flight to Melbourne. We don't understand. We both comment that they keep the temperature in the cabins fairly warm. Travis suspects it's to sell more refreshments. Revenue generation, you know. Every seat also has a TV in front of it, but to watch movies or in-flight TV, it will cost $10 with the swipe of a credit card. In Melbourne we wander the terminal looking for lunch so we can avoid buying it on the Melbourne/Perth flight. We have a pretty good Fish & Chips lunch at a pub and do some of the Cradle Mountain website updates while we wait for our flight (we have a 3 hour layover). We noticed on landing in Melbourne that it's really windy and as it turns out, that's true all the way to Perth and we end up having a 5 1/2 hour flight rather than the 4 1/4 planned. At least we're in cramped seats and a hot airplane cabin!!

We get to Perth, get our luggage and a Hyundai Accent rental car and are off to locate our East Fremantle (suburb of Perth) townhouse. We quickly discover that in Perth they call a road with lots of stop-lights a highway (in fact a "highway" seems to be no different than other streets)! We don't see any actual highways.

We make it to our townhouse and find a really nice 2 bedroom house built in 1907. Apparently the set of townhouses was built by a guy for a bunch of his dock-workers. It was nicely updated/expanded in the early 70s and is quite nice. It's for sale for the paltry sum of $550,000 US. The house has some quirks including burnt out light bulbs all over the place (5 out of 6 in the bathroom) and light switches that neither of us really wanted to touch. Despite all that, it's got lots of character and is quite comfortable. Best of all - it has internet and laundry facilities which have been lacking in Tasmania. It's on a small residential street but it has a number of restaurants and a pretty extensive wine shop. We walked to the grocery store and bought some basics, bought some wine at the wine shop and ordered a pizza from the pizza restaurant two doors down.

Finally, we started the first of many loads of laundry we'd do over the five nights in Perth.

Tuesday, December 23

We started the day very slowly on Tuesday. Both of us were still tired from the early start on Monday, the 12 hours of travel, and the 2 hour time change. We pretty much lazed around the house enjoying doing nothing. We also made a meal plan and a more extensive shopping list as we knew we'd need to make dinner for ourselves over the holiday.

About noon we decided to go scope out local beaches and find a place to go on Christmas Day. We navigated up the coast checking out various beaches and finally stopped for lunch at Pete's on the Beach, which apparently is famous Perth wide for it's hamburgers. We watched some oft the wind-boarders for a bit and then headed back into Fremantle (the Perth suburb where we're staying). We headed to the Perth Prison, which is now a museum.

The prison was built in 1890 by prisoners using local limestone they quarried onsite. Until this point, Western Australia hadn't contained any of the convicts sent from the UK. The prison was used continually until 1991 when it was finally closed. It will become a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009.

While buying tickets, Doug learned that to Aussies a "concession" is a discount (student, senior citizens, etc) instead of the selling of food and beverages at a venue. Our ticket agent could also sing Deep in the Heart of Texas. We're very impressed.

During the life of the prison, there were very few changes other than a doubling of cell size in the 60's (from 7 x 14 feet). The cell originally had running water in sinks but the plumbing was causing problems and they were removed. The cells never had toilets and convicts used buckets (yes... buckets!!) until the site closed (once again... yes... buckets... until 1991!!!).

On the way home we found a grocery store and spent far more time shopping than we thought we would. We're struggling a bit with different names for things, different units of measure (we later find out when making brownies that an Australian "cup" and an American "cup" are different), and having to check out unknown items throughout the store. We even found a Christmas tree with some LED lights (the top picture - quite stylist especially with a Matise print in the background, wouldn't you say?). Ninety minutes later we were home and putting groceries away.

With only one dinner out while here, we decided to try out the Fisherman's Wharf area and one of the local restaurants down there. Ciccerelo's has been operating since 1904 - although clearly not in the building we ate at. In a highly touristy area, the restaurants were closing at 9PM and we barely placed an order in time. We've noticed that the portions here are bordering on Texas sized and while our grilled Barramundi (local fish) was excellent, neither of us finished.

We had an official tree-lighting ceremony and then we were off to bed.

Wednesday, December 24

Remember our telling you about the house and all of its quirks? Well, the smoke alarm started beeping at 6AM from a low battery. UGH!

Each of our days here in the Perth area has had great weather - basically very sunny and hovering right around 29 C (84 F). Wednesday was the same as we set off to visit the Perth Mint.

You see, large amounts of gold were discovered in Western Australia (WA) in the late 1800s. Remember the big gold nugget that used to be at the Las Vegas Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino? That came from this area. Anyway, the local leaders quickly discovered that it was being found so quickly that they had no way of paying prospectors for it. They asked the government to build a mint so that they could melt down the gold and make coins for payment - or to send lots of money for them to do exchanges. The government decided on the mint and it was built - it's still in operation today (it's where the Sydney Olympic gold medals were made). It's not a huge place, but seems to get lots of visitors. The tour includes a guide telling the history of the mint, discussing life as a prospector, and includes a demonstration of pouring a bar of gold bullion (Travis wants one!). The mint also trades gold bullion and while we were there, a bunch of folks were in buying/selling. Travis passed up the gold purchasing opportunity (something about leaving his wallet at home).

After the Mint, we headed to a science museum called SciTech. It's basically a museum with only hands-on/interactive displays to teach about science. While it's probably targeted to kids, it's designed to entertain everyone and we both really enjoyed it. By the time we left, we pretty much had the place to ourselves (apparently Christmas Eve is THE time to go to science museums).

The museum is located above a mall and as we left at 5PM, Travis took the picture showing that there was no one in the mall. It's been pretty obvious to us that Christmas is not quite the big deal commercially it is in the US. While shops often had some decorations up, in general we saw very little evidence of Christmas as we drove around. Quite the difference from home.

We headed "home" to start battling kitchen appliances. Now for anyone who has ever rented a vacation house, it can be very challenging. We'd like to think that we're pretty good in dealing with whatever we encounter. We've had a lot of experience. For example, back in 2003 a bunch of us went to Italy and rented a villa on the Amalfi Coast. Beautiful place, but at one time the washing machine held Travis' clothes captive for almost a full day (we finally figured out what we were just pulling too hard on the door) and you had to watch how many things you turned on at the same time or else the main breaker feeding the estate would trip off where we would then have to drive back up to the road (most of the time after it was already dark) and reset the breaker. I think we did that 3 times. Then there was one combo washer/dryer in New Zealand 3 years ago which was neither a good washer nor dryer. Anyway, you get the picture. Well, this place almost exceeded our talents.

We managed the washing machine, but only because we've had so much experience with European styles. We only had one mis-operation, but we'll just call that a pop-quiz. The drier blew out hot air, but the drum didn't turn. No big deal, there was a clothes line out back. We just hung everything out. But the oven and the dishwasher! Oh my! It's like their controls used some type of appliance hieroglyphics and we didn't have a Rosetta Stone. We have pictures of both of them over there on the side for you. What do you think? Could you successfully use them? For the oven, we found the owner's manual in the house. They had a text description of the oven operations, and from that we could finally figure out what the symbols were trying to tell us. We didn't find a manual for the dishwasher. We tried once, very unsuccessfully, to run a load of dishes and finally came to the conclusion we hadn't a clue what we were doing. We couldn't find a manual on the internet for this particular model (it looked a little old), but we finally found a newer model of the same brand on-line. We found some symbols that apparently belong to a little known and seclusive appliance tribe and were finally able to figure out what to do.

For Christmas Eve, we had grilled chicken, roasted corn, sugar snap peas, salad, and brownies and ice cream for dinner. If anyone was worried about us starving to death on this trip, have no worries.

We woke up and actually cooked a hot breakfast - French Toast and Bacon (Aussie bacon - which is more like ham. Apparently you have to buy "Picnic" Bacon to get US style bacon). We also packed a bit of a picnic lunch for the beach.

We'd heard the beaches got crowded early but we figured leaving at 10:30 we'd be plenty early. WRONG. While we didn't have too much trouble finding parking, there were already tons of people on the beach (including a Santa with a bag of gifts). There were bunches of folks wearing Santa hats enjoying the sun. We started on the sand but it was incredibly windy and it felt like the skin was going to be sand blasted off. Finally we moved to a grassy terrace 5 feet above the sand and it made the world of difference. There was still a bit of wind, but no sand.

Throughout the day, large volumes of people came and went. The beach was never too packed - but I'd say it was busy all day and ever shifting groups. The water was a bit chilly upon entry but would feel pretty decent rather quickly once you moved around a bit. There were lots of waves which made for good body surfing - but lousy body surfing photos (using Travis' waterproof camera).

We had planned on starting at the beach and then maybe heading to the Perth Zoo later in the day (it is open every day and in fact has never been shut a single day since it opened in 1898!). Instead, we ended up enjoying the beach so much that we spent six hours there and decided to do the Zoo Friday.

Back home, we cooked Christmas dinner - steaks, baked potatoes, salad, broccoli and brownies with ice cream. Yummy! (Once again, no fear of us starving.)

Friday, December 26 - Boxing Day

We had another hot breakfast this morning - pancakes and some sort of sausage. It looked vaguely like pork sausage (Jimmy Dean) but didn't taste quite like that (it was beef rather than pork). It wasn't bad - but probably not designed for breakfast. After breakfast we made some calls to family who were still celebrating Christmas Day. For some reason, it's cheaper to call the US on our pre-paid SIM card than it is to call local Australia numbers. I'd blame it on the appliance designers - except the phones still have phone numbers and recognizable symbols so are clearly too easy to use.

After hanging up a bit more laundry to dry, we headed off to "the largest musical instrument in the world", the Perth Bell Tower. This glass and metal tower houses 18 bells and supposedly one of the few places in the world where you can view both the bell-ringers as well as the bell as they're being rung. Twelve of the bells are from the St. Martin in the Field church in London. Apparently when St. Martin had them made, they didn't sound quite right. They were about to have them melted down and remade and the Perth folks talked them into swapping them for raw materials. They added six more bells to the set and the bell tower was complete.

While we both thought this would be mildly interesting, it was much better than we expected. Getting a "song" out of these things is pretty complicated and we were seeing it with just six bells. I can't imagine how they keep things coordinated when there are 18 of them ringing!

There wasn't much open for lunch and we thought we'd go to a Subway sandwich shop we found close-by on the GPS. Unfortunately, this put is right in the middle of huge crowds doing after-Christmas shopping (apparently this is similar to US). After getting stuck for a while, we decided to punt on that idea and try to find something over by the zoo. We weren't having much luck over there (apparently it's just downtown and malls that are open) until we found a lonely Turkish restaurant selling kabobs. We foolishly think a kabob will be meat on a skewer. As it turns out, it's basically a turkish taco - and really good. I don't think either of us missed Subway.

We finally make it to the Zoo. While it's a fairly typical zoo, it does have very nice landscaping and obviously some animals that are exclusive to Australia. We learned that the word "Koala" in Aborigine means "no water." You see, the Koala bear doesn't drink any water. It gets any water that it needs from the leaves that it eats. We also learned that they are quite picky about their leaves and aren't even a bear at all. Their typical natural predators are dingos and wedgetail eagles.

Our favorites at the zoo were the dingo (who didn't seem all that wild), the red panda, and the sun bear. It's really more fun seeing animals out in their natural habitat, like we saw in Tasmania, but overall the zoo was pretty good.

That pretty much wraps up Perth. We're eating baked pasta back at the rental house for dinner and we have to pack up. We have a flight that leaves tomorrow for Melbourne.

See you in a few days!

See/hear the bells: