Western Australia Holiday - Day 3

Day 3

Good morning Day 3! Packed our lunch, ate our breakfast and off we went to explore.....

Lovely Blue Sky for our Road Trip

First Destination of the Day was the Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse. The lighthouse turned out to be a lot smaller than expected (and not directly beside the coast) so we decided to take a walk on the Whale Lookout Track first. It turned out to be a lovely walk! We took our time so it took us about 1.5 hours.

Erin walking @ Whale Lookout Track.  

The lighthouse is in the background

Girls with their grandma. They were so excited when they spotted the sea! 

On the wooden platform closer to coastline 

Just so beautiful! 

Me :-) 

Rare photo of the 5 of us for this trip

We spent quite some time on the wooden platform, just looking out into the sea.

An Australian couple taught us how to spot whales from afar.  We spotted about 6 whales!  (but really far away) 

Walking Back 

Taking a breather on a bench 

More Walking

Luckily, Erin enjoyed pretending being a train (complete with a "Chug a Chug a Choo Choo" sound effect and action!) and was willing to walk a lot that day. Phew! 

The small lighthouse 

The girls were tired after the walk, so we decided not to go into lighthouse afterall. (which had quite a lot of steps to climb) 

Picnic table where we had our lunch

Took photo only after we were done. Hehe. 

Then we took a short drive to Sugarloaf Rock, Cape Naturaliste

Coastline

Elyssa, Erin and I, with Sugarloaf Rock on the background.

It was c-o-l-d !! 

Sugarloaf Rock 

Then went back into the car and drove on.

Took this photo at one of the lookout points.It was an elderly couple all ready with their folding chairs, sipping hot drinks from their flasks, just enjoying each other's company and the scenery.  How nice  :-)

Next stop was Canal Rocks.
It was another lovely spot!!   (girls were fast asleep at this point and stayed in the car with MIL)

Photos -

Our next stop was Simmo's Ice-Creamery.

Entrance of Simmo's Ice-Creamery

We thought we would be able to see ice-cream making (told the girls we were going to an ice-cream factory) so was a tad disappointed that it was only an outlet selling ice-cream.  

Decided to skip the ice-cream and just moved on to grocery shopping!

Happy at Coles !  :-) 

Homecooked Dinner for the Night

Pan-fried cod fish, stir-fried broccoli and canned Minestrone soup. 

Enjoying Dinner

We popped a bottle of wine almost every day! 

Chilled after dinner and then ZZZzzzzzzzz....

 -End of Day 3-

Western Australia Holiday - Day 2

Day 2
Had a reaaaaally good night's sleep and woke up refreshed on Day 2 morning!

When I was still sleeping, hubby walked to the nearby IGA supermarket and bought some basic supplies of ham, butter, eggs, bread, cereal and milk :-))

We packed our lunch sandwiches, had breakfast then headed for our destination of the day :- Busselton Underwater Observatory.

Busselton Jetty

After the haze in KL, I just couldn't get enough of the blue skies! Yay! 

Waiting for the train to the Underwater Observatory

Choo Choo!  The train is coming!

Enjoying the Train Ride 

Underwator Observatory : "Descending 8 meters below sea level, visitors can view the corals and fish life through eleven viewing windows"  (source: Wikipedia)

The top window

Erin watching a fish swim by 

School of Fish 

Feels amazing to be able to get an "underwater" view of things! (without us getting wet) 

Corals 

Can spot us? 

I didn't realise hubby was taking a photo, but Elyssa did and posed for daddy. haha! 

Living Corals 

Took some photos after the tour 

Train is here again!

Daddy with his princesses

After Busselton Jetty, it was time for one of our favourite activities in Aussie - grocery shopping! We also shopped around in Target departmental store to look for gloves for the girls.  It was a lot colder than expected. Brrrr!   I actually packed some sleeveless tops and shorts for them cos I didn't expect it to be this cold. Adoi.

We were back at our apartment around 5pm.  Free and easy holiday mah!

Our little pantry was pretty well stocked by the end of the day  :-) 

Fridge was pretty full too

Dinner - Pasta and wine.     

After dinner, we just chilled. Chat, chat and finished up the bottle of wine.

End of Day 2.
ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

Western Australia Holiday - Day 1

Day 1

We booked our Perth holiday 4 months before actual departure. After many many "Are we going Australia yet???  Why so long??? Is it time yet??" questions from the girls (ok, mainly Erin since she doesn't quite get the concept of months yet) we were all super happy when it was really time for Day 1. Yippeee!

All excited at KLIA !

MIL joined us for this holiday too 

Departed on a hazy Friday

It was a really tiring week for me. I flew to Bangkok on a business trip early Mon morning and then flew back late Tues evening. Thankfully it was a public holiday on Weds. Then took an early morning flight on Thurs for my first interview session at 9am in Singapore. Did 4 rounds of interview + lunch session then took the 7pm flight home. Gosh, I felt so drained!  

We booked the taxi for 5.30am on Friday. I wasn't fully done with my packing and had initially planned to finish packing on Thursday evening. But was so exhausted after reaching home that I decided to just go to sleep and set my alarm to go off at 4am. 

So Friday morning was a blur of last minute packing and getting the girls ready! 

The flight itself was ok. Girls were happy they got to watch Hi-5. I was exhausted but just couldn't fall asleep.  Grr!  Just like our Adelaide trip, I reached Aussie in a zombified state. Sigh.

Got ourselves a SIM card at the Perth airport 

Only AUD$ 2 a day for 500GB data and free local calls !  

Traffic from Perth airport to Mandurah was unexpectedly bad.  Stuck in traffic + whiney (tired girls) + exhausted mummy = not a good combination at all  :-(

Fish & Chips Dinner at Cicerello's, Mandurah 

After dinner, we headed straight to Busselton. We booked 7 nights at The Sebel Busselton, under our Marriott Vacation Club program.

We had a mini drama before we reached our apartment.  At 7.50pm, I made a call to the apartment receptionist, to just tell them that we were on our way. The guy calmly told us to retrieve our keys at the postbox just next to the apartment gates and gave us the combination password to the postbox. Just before ending the call, I asked what time do they normally close and he said 8pm.  OMG!  OMG!  If I had called just 15 minutes later, we would have been locked out!!!!! (we later discovered they already emailed the "pls call in advance if arrive after 8pm"  info to hubs but he missed the email).

An exhausted me + no place to stay that night ; now, that would have been an awful, awful combination!  OMG!

We did get a little lost finding the apartment. When we finally it and saw the postbox next to the gates, my heart was thumping when hubby tried the combination password. When it opened, we were both jumping up and down, grinning like little monkeys. Hehehe!

True to Marriott style (or in this case Accor apartments since we did a point swap), the apartment didn't disappoint us.

Pictures -

Dining and Kitchen Area

Master Bedroom 

Bathtub in Master Bathroom 

2nd Bedroom

Washing Machine and Dryer in the 2nd Bathroom 

3rd Bedroom up in the loft

Yipppee!  Loved the apartment.  Definitely would have been too expensive to stay without our points.

We quickly unloaded the car, settled down the girls and then ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzz..........

Busy, Busy

*blow*  *blow*  - another round of blowing cobwebs in this blog  ;-)  

I seem to be doing this far too often these days!  But I love this blog of mine too much to leave it completely idle.  So I guess occasional  cobweb blowing is better than a completely dormant blog!

So, it has been a super, super busy time lately.  But in a pretty good way. Busy phase at work (on one of the days, I was so tired until I took a 20 minute nap on the filing room FLOOR before working till 1am that day), ran a half marathon (would have been 2 if the KL run wasn’t cancelled last Sun cos of the haze. Grr!),  busy attending interviews and then we had our family holiday in Australia, all bundled up in one month+.  The interview part was the unexpected element. Gosh, I did 9 interviews in about 3 weeks! 2 prospective employers – one with 3 rounds and another with 6 rounds.  Thankfully I had my lucky stars all lined up and I received both offers.  The one I preferred came up with a better package than the other,  so the selection was a no-brainer.  I start on Dec 1.  Gosh,  I’m excited and a part of me is also terrified!  New industry, new work environment, new boss, new colleagues, new team, new….. everything!  

So much for me to process at the moment. I really want to sit down to write my day-by-day account of the Australia holiday. Ah well, maybe this weekend.  In the meantime, here’s a photo of the 2 little princesses @ Busselton, Western Australia.  Love their happy faces!