Whale World

Happy Birthday Grandpa! It’s been a busy couple of days in Albany. Yesterday we packed up from Betty’s Beach and drove into town, going straight to the Wind Farm which is on a headland at the bottom of Albany and actually pretty cool – there’s 12 turbines and a couple of different viewing spots for them, including one that you can walk right under. I know some people think the noise of them would be annoying, but I actually quite liked the steady swish, swish, swish, I think it would kind of be like living next to the beach and hearing waves maybe. Anyway after that it was to The Gap and a natural rock bridge – they’re always amazing to see, things like that, although it always gives me a heart attack thinking about the boys skipping around with no railings stopping you from plummeting off a cliff top a couple of hundred feet into the see. I’m not the most relaxing person to be around there and Daniel was telling me yesterday that I was hurting his hand I was gripping onto it so tightly J Then in the afternoon we went to Whale World, which is the old whaling station here turned into a tourist attraction talking not only about whaling in Albany, but about whales and sharks in general. It sounds weird but it’s a good centre – although it freaked Conor out because part of the tour involves some audio of people telling about how they towed the whale in, pulled it up onto this big wooden chopping block and then basically hacked it up. There’s also the huge toothed saw there that they chopped up the heads with. He just couldn’t listen to any more and didn’t really enjoy it after that – I asked if it was the gruesomeness or the fact that it was about killing animals and he said both. Daniel seemed to enjoy it and Nick and I found it very interesting – there was a skeleton room with a couple of whole skeletons, including of a pygmy blue whale (whales that had died naturally) which were pretty cool. Also a section of blubber so you could see what it looks like, and even some whale lice (!) which were found on one of the whales that washed ashore dead (it was very unwell apparently).

Anyway that was most of the afternoon, then we moved to our new campsite, Torbay Inlet – we met someone who said that it was supposed to be a windy rainy night so we decided an inlet might have more coverage than a campsite by the sea. We got our tarp up over the tent and everything, and it was quite windy but with not much rain so we were fine. It’s been sunny again today but still pretty windy and not so warm any more. Today we did more touristy stuff, went to see the Brig Amity, a ship that brought the first European settlers here from Sydney to try and set up a penal colony (not so successful), and the museum which had quite a good kids area with some hands on stuff. Now we’re at the library so the kids could use a computer for a bit and we can use the power for our computer. Tomorrow we’ll pack up and head on, not quite sure where to yet (homework for tonight)