'Doing Time' Down Under Style!!!

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Well, I have just celebrated my second birthday and also my 9th wedding anniversary in Australia.

The first one was 5 years ago and was spent in Cairns on the beach in glorious sunshine watching wild dolphins swim by this year it was a working day and raining and grey so just like being in the UK!

We decided to just have a quiet night in and celebrate at the weekend instead and thankfully the weather picked up so we had sunshine! On the Saturday night Doug cooked a lovely dinner and we had a bottle of champagne ... lovely!

On the Sunday we went down to the beach with the dogs and had a lovely walk until we were rained off! You could see the weather coming in from the ocean really fast. It is amazing to watch it roll in and the sky turned a very dark black. The ocean turns the most amazing colour when it does this - sort of a pale green/blue colour and washes up the most lovely coloured seaweed and also blue bottles (jelly fish!). Last week a dead humpback whale washed up in the local harbour and it had to be removed as sharks had followed it in from the ocean - so needless to say we didn't let the dogs swim in the ocean for fear of them being eaten by the sharks!

In the afternoon we went into Perth to visit the Fremantle Prison. It was brilliant ... in a kind of sobering scary way. The prison was built in the 1850's by convict labour and only closed in 1991. It was the most magnificiant limestone building but it must have been a horrible place to 'do time' both in the 1800's and also in more recent times. It held men, women and in it's earliest days children as young as 9 many transported over from Parkhurst in the Isle of Man!!

We also saw the gallows which was horrific and the guide told us that to minimise the stress on the prisoner they were led from the holding cell to the gallows and hung within 60 seconds! They also had the option of being hung sat on a chair if they were unsteady on their feet due to the fear and the chair would go down the drop with them - I didn't hang around too much as it was a horrible place and really scared me especially when the guide started telling ghost stories.

After the prison tour we had a walk (mainly to try to calm me down!!) and had lunch at Cicerrollos the best fish and chip shop ever overlooking the port. Fremantle is a lovely place to visit and I always feels like I am on holiday when I am there!

We are now in late Spring over here so it is really starting to warm up now. We have loads of activities planned for the next few months and also moving into our new house so we are going to be really busy and I can't believe it is now October. We realised that it has been a year since we left work and moved out of house in the UK - it has totally flown by. We are also coming up to our 1 year anniversary of living in Perth in November - bizarre!!!

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