Moving to Wordpress

I'm moving this site over to Wordpress.  Hopefully it will all go perfectly (right) but if it doesn't I thought I'd let everyone know what's going on.  The website address is still the same but it can take up to a couple of days for it to completely transfer.  On the new site I'll post a welcome message, if you see that then all is good!

Random Cuteness

After we visited the Perth Mint we stopped in at Nando’s for a quick bite before getting back on the train.  I ended up across the table from little TurboBug and I thought he just might fall asleep there. 

He was so tired and it was the cutest thing.  Dada started playing with him which is probably all that kept him awake until the food came.

There’s that dimple.

My boy sitting next to me put his head down too so I couldn’t help but turn the camera around.  You can see the remnants of his black eye that he got from a collision on the jumping pillow.

One more…I tried zooming in on this to crop out some of the table, but then you lose perspective on how small he is and that’s what makes this a lovely picture of him.  He’s getting so big, but he’s still my little guy for now.

After sharing some chicken and a couple of huge plates of chips we all felt like we might be able to go on and so off to the train it was.  Tired and hungry kids are no fun to drag around town, we at least were able to eliminate the hungry part for the time being.

So many little memories on this trip (in life, really), I think I’m going to start posting random memories as they come to mind to help me remember details.  The kind of thing we don’t have pictures of but don’t want to forget.

A Tour of the Perth Mint

We had been looking forward to the Perth Mint for a long time, ever since our visit to the Canberra Mint back in May.  So it became the first tourist attraction we visited in Perth and we decided we’d take the train to get there.  We weren’t sure what parking would be available and we have a toddler who really, really wanted to ride the train.  In Perth the train track runs down the centre of the freeway and he saw it as soon as we got into town. 

We only had to go a few stops and then caught one of the free buses in the CBD.  It was a very hot day so we thought we were doing well to choose an indoor attraction, but using public transportation still made for a very warm trip into town.

Photography isn’t allowed inside the building, so you’re about to be treated to all the pictures I could take outside.  :)  See the double archway at the entrance?  We learned that back when the mint was first built the workers had a separate entrance to the family that lived in the residence upstairs. 

They offer a tour that included a talk on the history of the gold rush in the area.  The first part of the tour was outside where they had replicas of very large gold nuggets that had been found.  They were huge!  The stories of how they were found and the history of the mint were quite interesting.  After the tour the kids wanted pictures of all the nuggets.   I was surprised how busy it was, our tour group was quite large even though it was just a few days before Christmas.

Now for the numerous pictures of my children holding replicas of giant gold nuggets.

After the tour you have access to the displays to look around as much as you want.  There’s all kinds of things to look at including numerous gold nuggets and coins.  They’ve also got the biggest coin in the world, a 1 tonne gold coin made in 2012.  It’s huge at 80cm in diameter and 12cm deep, it really weighs a tonne (which I’ve only recently realised is different from a ton, I thought it was just the spelling!) and though its face value is $1 million it’s worth more like $53 million at current market value.  Every night it descends into a vault, if you are there for the last tour of the day you can watch it be put away for the night.

Even the wristbands were gold, nice touch.  There was a jewelry store on site and we were happy to see some Kimberley pink diamonds like we’d seen in Kununurra.  They also sell specialty coins, some of them are so beautiful.  The Canberra mint has a better selection of coins and a lot more detail about how they are made.  We were happy to see the Han Solo coin, just in time for the new Star Wars movie.

The absolute best part of the tour and the part that made it very much worth the visit was the gold-pouring demonstration.  It’s done in the original melting house and they give you all the history as you watch.  Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold had been embedded in the walls and ceiling over the years.  We watched as the tour guide carefully pulled the gold out of the oven and poured it into the mold.  He’d obviously done it many times and was very comfortable with the process.  He talked about the temperatures and whatnot, touching it while the gold bar was still hot and lighting his gloves on fire.  At the end he placed the bar back into the oven and it was only seconds before it was fully melted again.  He told us they’d been using the same gold bar for this demonstration for the last eighteen years!

We also enjoyed the scale where you could find out if you’re worth your weight in gold.  We all weighed ourselves and it told us how much we’d be worth at current gold prices.  There’s also a gold bar you can lift, it was a bit tricky as they have it secured very well inside a box and you can’t lift it very high.  It was pretty heavy and not all of the kids could lift it.

And finally, some random pretty flowers on the grounds at the mint. 

Across the street was a coveniently-located coin shop.  It carried many of the coins from the Canberra mint that the Perth mint didn’t have in their shop so we stopped in for a look. I imagine they do good business there.

Lake Thetis and Cervantes

On the way back from the Pinnacles we stopped into Lake Thetis to have a look at the stromatolites.  We saw a few roadsigns, which I keep taking pictures of.

The town of Cervantes was named for a Spanish ship that wrecked off the coast once upon a time.  I loved the sign on the way into town, it’s spaced very well so that you see a picture of the ship from a distance, then the signs separate as you get closer.

There aren’t many places on earth that you can see stromatolites.  They look like rocks, but the are really structures built by living micro-organisms and are referred to as ‘living fossils’.  The structures make for interesting patterns.  We’d seen some in Shark Bay (which hopefully I’ll get to post about one of these days), these were different shapes than the others we’d seen.

The view across the lake.  I guess all the stromatolites are just on the one side?  There is a path to walk all the way around the lake if you wish to.

I don’t know if this counts as a Big Thing, but we stopped for a picture with this fish sculpture on our way out of town.

After Cervantes we were headed for Perth!

The Pinnacles: Nambug National Park

The Pinnacles were definitely on our list of places to visit in Western Australia.  They feature in the book Are We There Yet? but the illustration had the kids fooled.  From the drawing they had the idea that there were only a few rock formations, they were in for a pleasant surprise.  First we stopped into the Discovery Centre at Nambug National Park for a quick look. 

Then we headed down the short path to see how much we could see before doing the driving circuit.

There were plenty of nearby formations to get lost in.  There isn’t a specific walking path and though you can’t tell it from these pictures, there were people wandering around everywhere.  It was so odd to be in this national park full of people when we’ve been to so many that were nearly empty.  But here in the Pinnacles we are only two hours north of Perth and it was the weekend.

There’s JitterBug photobombing in the background again.  I told the kids to find their favourite rock for a picture so they all went in different directions.

We couldn’t get over how yellow the sand is!  Some of the pictures in this post I used filters on for different effects, but this one below is what we saw.  Such yellow, yellow sand.  It was so striking.

Let’s play Spot the Toddler!  This area was up on a hill, all the formations were shorter (toddler height!), I suppose because the wind must keep them from getting any taller.  It was definitely windy here.

I got a cute emu bookmark.  Aren’t you happy for me?

We wandered around for awhile and just when the kids had a good game of hide and seek going we headed back to the car to do the drive through the park.

I promise there were other people there.  They must all be hiding amongst the rocks. 

TurboBug was determined to walk the entire length of the wall bordering the footpath.  No section was to be missed.

I’ll never finish this post if I try to write about each picture…so here we go, picture overload.

The evenly-spaced rocks in the foreground mark the edge of the ‘road’.

Look at the different colours!  That yellow sand, the white sand dune, and the ocean in the distance.  We saw many of these white, white sand dunes on the way to Cervantes.

At one point we started seeing a layer of pink at the bottom of the formations.

This reminded me of Delicate Arch in Arches National Park.  :)