Tuesday 18 February 2014 - Albany, WA

Tuesday 18 February 2014 - Albany, WA

We’re in one of WA’s oldest towns (well, I think it’s a city) – it was actually settled two years before Perth! That being said, it hasn’t really tugged at the heartstrings of either of us. Perhaps because all this celebration of European settlement and history doesn’t really acknowledge the indigenous contribution to this great country, but probably moreso because it’s cool (jumpers and trackies every morning and night, long sleeved shirts and long-ish pants most days and this is summer!) and we just want to go home. It is beautiful though, but unfortunately the cloudy weather over the past few days has done nothing for the scenic views everywhere we go.

Today we went to Whale World, where we experienced a very thorough and graphic picture of the whaling days in Albany (which only concluded at the end of 1978... the year Glenn was born). Then we took a scenic route (read sandy track) to ‘shortcut’ the way out. We’d deliberately bypassed looking at all the standard tourist sites along the way (Natural Bridge, The Gap, Blowholes etc) because Glenn was really hungry. Unfortunately our shortcut was blocked just as we came out to the road, by a couple of trucks and workers. Backtrack baby! The rest of the day was spent hanging out in a cool cafe and shopping in a ‘traditional’ grocery store (Yas and I) and grocery shopping/errand running before our Esperance drive tomorrow (Sienna and Glenn).

Yesterday we explored the centre of town, checked out the Old Gaol, ate a nice cafe meal and drove around a bit. There was heaps of other things we would have liked to have done, but we’re trying to keep things very simple with the girls, plus as I mentioned, we’re just keen to get moving towards home. The previous two days we had a nice time checking out cheese, honey and toffee factories (lots of samples and a fair few purchases were made) around Denmark and wandered through the little town itself. We also put in a good hour or so at the playground. It’s a beautiful town and quite ‘alternative’ but in a fairly non-pretentious way. I could definitely spend a bit of time there, but it’s just not gonna happen right now.