Happy Mother’s Day Week!
I can still say this since my card and gift for my mother
still haven’t arrived…you can never predict how long customs will hang onto
things!
Also, Happy 80th Birthday to Matt’s Granddad Don
Corin (May 10th)!
It has been a while since I updated the blog. While
everything here continues to go well, I had a hard couple of weeks thanks to
rats living in our roof. I became suspicious the first week we were here since
I could hear scratching noises above the study. The noises continued and I
contacted our property manager to send out a pest control person. Well, that
took over a week to happen. In the meantime, Matt and I had purchased an
inflatable hot tub and were breaking it in with nightly soaks. Even at four in
the afternoon we could see the rats going in and out of the roof near a
downspout and running around to a tree in the back garden to eat the berries.
The good news was they had a food source and were only in the roof, not the
rest of the house. The bad news was that I had a bit of a freak out. Years ago,
when I lived in New York, a similar thing occurred when we had mice in our
apartment. Of course at that time I wasn’t working, had enrolled in grad school
at Pratt, and was under a bit more stress. And I really freaked out. This time
I did a little better, but I was not happy hearing those rats running around
over the kitchen and bedroom. Ick.
So eventually the pest man came and rolled poison baits down
into the part of the ceiling where we heard the most activity. Five days later
the house smelled a bit and despite the screens on the windows, flies were all
over, but that disappeared and since then I haven’t heard any rats in the roof.
Which is very good. I keep thinking I am hearing things outside, but a
neighborhood cat climbs the walls and visits our back garden frequently, so I
hope she will dissuade any other rodents from setting up house here!
I didn’t want to blog before, as I was feeling pretty
negative about the house and being here without Matt with rodents running
around above me. We did manage a bit of fun and hit up the O Day street
festival in Northbridge on Sunday April 28th, where we wandered
around collecting free magnets in shops and restaurants and had lunch at
Flipside, home to the “Kenny Burger,” which was very good!
Matt went back to work, I stayed here and tried to stay
busy, but it was a long week. I ventured to Ikea and picked up a few things we
still needed, which helped J.
Soon though, Matt was back, we weren’t hearing the rats, and
we had a nice week together.
On Friday, May 3rd, we left Perth in the morning
and drove up to Nambung National Park, home of The Pinnacles. In case you have
time to kill and really want to trace our route, we made a quick stop in
Lancelin on the way there.
Even though Matt is a geologist, and The Pinnacles Desert is
only a two-hour drive from Perth, he hadn’t seen them yet.
The (Jane version of the) story is that they were once
seashells crushed together and eventually sediments deposited and turned them
into limestone. I am sure if you ask Matt he would explain it in much more
depth. And Wikipedia presents three theories as to their formation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pinnacles_(Western_Australia).
Anyway, they are pretty awesome to see, popping out of the sand over a really
large area.
I first visited on a tour last year, but it was great to go
back and see how much Matt enjoyed them. And how much he enjoyed photographing
his car in front of them!
After doing the walk and drive at The Pinnacles, we headed
to the nearby town of Cervantes and discovered that another geological
phenomenon nearby. At Lake Thetis, just outside of town, there are
stromatolites! When I took that tour last year, Matt and I were just friends,
and he was all excited that I would get to see stromatolites at Hamelin Pool.
(Some of you may remember my post about those last year). We weren’t going that
far north on this trip, so it was pretty cool that Matt and I got to check out
stromatolites together. They are part of the reason we exist, after all, thanks
to their oxygenating the Earth.
After looking at the stromatolites for a few minutes, since
that is all you can do, we headed to breezy Hangover Bay for a BBQ lunch. I
remembered everything except tongs for the BBQ, which I think might be in the
garage, but we made do and had a nice lunch. Then it was time to head to New
Norcia.
In an attempt to practice even more Spanish, Matt changed
the GPS language and “Monica” gave us directions. She did not, however, mention
that we would be driving on several unsealed, winding gravel roads, populated
by human sized kangaroos. Big human sized!
It was an exciting, unnerving, and
scenic drive. I cannot tell you at all where we were, but about two hours later
we arrived in New Norcia.
New Norcia is an interesting place. Benedictine monks
founded it as a mission in 1847, literally in the middle of nowhere in WA. The
second abbot decided to build private colleges, which were very successful but
have since closed. They had cottages for Aboriginal families and schools for
the Aboriginal children as well. They have a flour mil and bake bread, grow
olives for olive oil, as well as grapes for wine. The bread is pretty popular
and available in Mt Hawthorn at the New Norcia Bakery.
Matt and I were staying at the New Norcia Hotel. Originally
built in the 1920’s for family visiting the monks and college students, it is
the only option in town that isn’t gender segregated and doesn’t require
getting up at five am for prayers. It is also the place to try Abbey Ale and
Abbey wine, including their vintage port. Once we had checked into our room, we
headed down to the hotel bar for some food and Abbey Ale and wine. It was pretty
good. I tasted a bit too much, but I slept very well!
The next day after a continental breakfast, we checked out
and booked our town tour. On the tour we saw the outside of the monastery,
inside the Abbey Church, inside an old Aboriginal family cottage, the
operational New Flour Mill (1879), and inside both of the colleges, which are
closed to the public. We also saw the chapels inside St Ildephonsus College and
St Gertrude’s College, which were pretty impressive and unexpected just off the
Great Northern Highway!
Our tour group included, as they always seem to do,
some very chatty and disrespectful people, but it was pretty interesting. I
enjoyed seeing and experiencing something completely different to what you
usually find in WA. We came away with an Abbey Ale glass and a bottle of the
port to cellar…for a while!
We left New Norcia early in the afternoon and headed to
Bindoon on the recommendation of Matt’s co-worker Brad, that we try the Bake
house there. I am very glad we did. I had a pasty for lunch and Matt had a meat
pie. They were good, but we also left with carrot cake, a huge cinnamon roll
(hard to find here), a white chocolate brownie, and banana bread. Lets just say
breakfast the next day and snacks along the road were very, very nice!
After Bindoon we were on our way to Merredin, where we would
spend the night, and we happened to drive through a town called Toodyay. No
idea where the name comes from, but it was a really charming little town. We
decided to stop and stretch our legs. We were browsing in the old firehouse now
art gallery and Matt bought me a very nice little painting. The woman there
told us to go look at the old gaol and courthouse, which we did, and we drove
on to a lookout over the Avon Valley that the town is in. It was an unexpected
but very enjoyable stop.
Later on our drive on the Great Eastern Highway, we stopped
in Meckering and checked out a display all about an Earthquake, 6.9 on the
Richter Scale, which rocked the area in 1968. We had never heard anything about
it, but the photos and facts presented were striking. As it was a public
holiday, there were few injuries even though the school and several buildings
were destroyed.
In the evening we arrived at our motel in Merredin. It had a
handy little kitchenette for breakfast the next day. We headed into town and
had a nice dinner at The Commercial Hotel. It wasn’t very busy and we
discovered this was because the entire town was at some huge party a few blogs
from our motel. The thumping music carried into the night and Matt was awakened
when the partygoers came back at 2 AM and were sick in the parking lot. We are
old. Also, we will not be going back to Merredin.
The only reason we were there was to check out Wave Rock in
even tinier Hyden, about an hour south of Merredin in the Wheatbelt region.
(This little trip was very geological).
Wave Rock is actually a part of Hyden Rock, a granite
outcropping. Wave Rock is 100 meters long and 15 meters high (think yards,
people). It began forming underground 60 million years ago. Noongar aboriginal
people lived in the area for thousands of years. The town and the rock were
named after a sandalwood cutter who camped in the area in 1920.
Matt and I both thought it was pretty awesome. After taking
the obligatory surfer pose shots, we climbed up and walked all around the rock
following trail markers.
There were two ways to get down: steep and stairs. I
chose stairs since I have a tendency to fall down steep things. And stairs for
that matter, but at least there was a railing!
It, like the Pinnacles, is one of those awesome things that
you want to see, and then when you have walked all around and taken loads of
photos and read the literature, you say “ok, well glad we did that,” and then
you’ve done it and that’s all.
We left Hyden for our four-hour Sunday drive back to Perth
with stops in Corrigin and York. Matt noticed this sign as we whizzed past and we turned around - we had just passed the Rabbit Proof Fence, the longest fence in the world!
It was nice to get out of Perth and go exploring.
Monday we
relaxed, and then went to dinner at Il Pasto, a little Italian restaurant on
Ninth Avenue in Inglewood I had been dying to try. It was delicious, all of it.
Unlike Merredin, we will definitely go back!
Since Matt has been at work this week, I have been busy at
home working on translating, organizing our upcoming trip to Malaysia and Matt
has been figuring out what else he wants to do to celebrate his big 30
birthday. The weather is cooler, highs between 20-25 C, or 60-70 F with lots of
rain. It looks like pretty good weather the rest of the week though, which is
good news as Matt gets back Wednesday!
Thanks for reading,
Jane
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