this and that

This is post about lots of different things, all unrelated. Firstly, I just heard that my daughter got invited to audition for the junior year at the Royal Ballet School in London.  She attends one of the Royal Ballet School’s regional centres on a scholarship and they’ve asked her and one other student to go to London to audition for a place in the…

Its that time again

Yup, another year flashes past in a haze and it’s now 11:48pm, just a mere 12 minutes to go until 2011. Its a bit funny really, the way we humans treat what is just an arbitrary date when all is said and done, with such significance.  It’s the end of a year, the start of another cycle (although that kinda happens on the 21st…

Brrrr, its a bit chilly

Yes, it’s cold, I might even have to put some jeans on. All of you in the Northern Hemisphere, up to your necks in white global warming, are probably thinking: “Ha, yeah right, you’re in Perth, I’ve watched some cricket (ok, it’s pretty unlikely that any Americans would say the last bit as cricket is as foreign to them as baseball is to the…

Iiiiiiitttttts Christmas

…and I hate it. Well, not the actual Christmas bit, per se, just the commercialisation of it. The bit that screams in big neon writing.. From October, the shops were full of tat, ready for the eager consumer to get into the spirit.  The TV (which we don’t usually watch – so this year I feel somewhat spared from the worst of the misery)…

Holidays, the end

And so came the day we had to go home – boooo!  We’d had a lovely time, but we still had 950km to drive back, so we had to leave early.  We packed everything back in the car remarkably easily, set the chiller bag in the middle seat for the girls to have easy access to food and drinks without having to stop too…

Holidays, part 7 – boats, pearls, dolphins and dugongs

On the last day, we went back to Monkey Mia to go on a catamaran, the Aristocat 2, which sails out into Shark Bay in search of dolphins, turtles, dugongs and black pearls.  It was a beautiful day, in contrast to the day before – we really do have the best luck! The boat sails early, so we got there in plenty of time…

Holidays, part 6 – off road to Cape Peron

The next day the weather wasn’t so good, so we decided to go to the Peron Homestead, an old sheep station in the Francis Peron national park and then take the car off road and go up to the top of the peninsula to Cape Peron. The homestead was very cool – the people that used to do this stuff (and still do I…

Holidays, part 5 – shell beach and dolphins

The next day, we had a poke around Denham, stocked up on food and beer ($50 for a carton of Corona – thats really cheap!) and decided that we’d do a little exploring. There aren’t a great many things to do in Shark Bay that don’t involve some kind of water/fishing/swimming type activity, so we loaded up the car and drove to Shell Beach,…

Holidays, part 4 – Kalbarri Gorge to Denham via Hamelin Pool

It was a long drive between the gorge and Hamelin Pool, long, hot and boring with most of looking like the road below.  For hours and hours. We stopped at the Billabong Roadhouse for lunch – this place is really in the middle of nowhere and offers an oasis of fuel, food and erm, a place for a much needed ‘comfort break’  They did…

Holidays, part 2 – Lancelin to Kalbarri

We left Lancelin early, as frankly the hotel accommodation left everything to be desired and we couldn’t stand being there any more.  That and we had a huge drive to Kalbarri to do before the end of the day. Before last week, there was no road north from Lancelin, you had to go east inland 30km or so and hop on the main highway,…