Vacation in WA- Day 08

On the morning of Day 08, we woke up in a cottage on a 'farm'. I booked all the accomodation online in Singapore and had wanted to stay on a farm to experience the farm life. However, when we arrived the day before, we quickly realised that it's not a real farm, as in, it wasn't a working farm. It's more of a tourist farm, a piece of land with several cottages and some animals for feeding. There're many such establishments around where you can just pay to do animal feedings therefore you don't have to stay on a farm like this. Luckily, the cottage was pretty decent and clean so we didn't really minded much.

So this morning, we went for our animal feeding. We had looked forward to this for a long time and again, the flies really spoilt the experience for us. All Aidan could handle was to swat away flies on his face. It was most irritating.

Feeding the ponies.

The goats

An alpaca. This one was sweet and shy and not like the one on Country Life farm, which was snorting and spitting mucous at everyone.

In the shed with the guinea pigs. It's so much better in the shed as I quickly learnt that flies like it hot.

After feeding, we were off to the Shearing Shed to see some sheeps being sheared!

Shearing in progress. At first, Aidan was quite terrified by the way the man was (man)handling the sheep in a really rough way and seeing the fur being shaved off. If I remember right, another small girl in the group cried.

Almost done.

Nice and naked. Hehe...I wonder if they feel relieved of all that fur. It must have felt nice and cooling as the weather was so hot!

All that fur! You see the fur at the back that looks grey in color? That's how dirty it is on the outside. But inside, as you can see from the front of the picture, the true color is creamy white!

Picture with black sheeps in the background.

Then we went outside and there was a demo of sheep herding. Most exciting to see the whole herd of sheeps thundering towards us.

Sheep dog pouncing on the sheeps. I don't know why it does that.

A border-collie

Then we came back in to feed baby lambs! Aren't they cute?

I was feeding the biggest lamb of all! It's so big and strong that no one else wanted to feed it. It sucked really ferociously on the bottle.

Then it's lunch. Another beautiful vineyard for yummy food. We got clever and decided that instead of sharing miserable portions of food and ended up dissatisfied, we would have our fill at lunch, then cook our own dinner back at the cottage.

This is the starter tasting plate. Every dish was delicous. Even the cous-cous that I don't usually fancy is fantastic.

Risotto done to perfection!

My memory is failing me but I think this was my Veal. Extremely tender and juicy. *slurps*

Saw this at the deli outside the supermarket and I couldn't resist. Anyway, we cooked eggs for breakfast every morning so that's not a problem.

I think all eggs should be this way. Coming from free range, happy chickens and not from the factory style, unhappy and immobile chickens where most of our eggs come from.

Lovely eggs and most delicious too!

A shot of the back of our cottage. Do you see the electric bbq?

Vacation in WA- Day 07

Wow...so many things happened and I totally lost the momentum to blog. Just to summarize, the most major of all was probably our moving house. Yes, we have moved and are now nicely settled at our new place. Then it was CNY and so many things to prepare. Had to ready our house for CNY so that we can host and have guests over. I was craving for my own made pineapple tarts and so I was busy baking. Aidan is now attending half-day childcare so I have some time in the morning to go marketing, bake and do some housework. I have been cooking dinner everyday. Life's great but I better get on with blogging or I won't be able to remember Perth soon.

So on the morning of this day, we went to Candy Cow, the candy factory. There's a honeycomb making demonstration in the morning and when we got there, it had just started.

See the golden slabs on the table behind the glass? They're honeycomb. Aidan was quite intriqued to see the honeycomb rising and growing in a huge tub. Then when it was done and cut in to slabs, they gave us some to try....it was nice and warm and it melted in the mouth.

Aidan riding on a wooden cow rocker

I think Aidan must have missed the presence of kids very much after being with just mommy n daddy for so many days. He was quite excited to see children and tried to 'mingle' lol.

Lunch Time! Olives! I never knew they look like this fresh. I've only seen the black rings on pizza and the pickled green ones in Martinis. Hehe...sounds like the story of kids nowadays who didn't know eggs had shells? I didn't really like eating this but DH seemed to enjoy it.

We had lunch at a winery estate, Lamont's and the prices on the menu were just exhorbitant! And also the menu was quite confusing to read. It doesn't say which are appetisers, starters or mains. I later realised that some people would order a full 3-course meal and most at least a 2-course. In Singapore, we would usually order just a main course each and maybe an appetiser to share if there are more people around. So we ended up with a tuna on skewers and some fried squid thingy (both starters!) haha....both were so delicious and we were all hungry for more!

A still hungry daddy.

In the end, we went to the supermarket and bought food back to our cottage to cook! Meat was cheap and we had BBQ beef and lamb. All our accomdation so far came equipped with a gas grill outside for our use. No pictures cos I refused to go outside to be irritated by the flies.

Aidan chilling on the couch in his PJs.

Vacation in WA- Day 06

Didn't take any pictures of our accomodation in Busselton because it's erm...a rickety old house and not very nice.

Anyway, we are in the South! So it's animals time! Our first stop, Country Life Farm. It's one of the many establishments in South WA that has animals kept so that we tourist can pay them a fee to feed their own animals! Isn't that a most clever idea?!

In the smelly barn with enormous number of rabbits and guinea pigs. I heard someone commented that the rabbits are breeding like rabbits in there. Hmm...but of course.

There's a carousel and I didn't expect Aidan to go on it but he did and enjoyed himself alot. This one doesn't go up and down though, it just goes round.

It went on for really long time! Till the parents were tired of taking pictures and the kids wanted to come down. haha...

Back to feeding more rabbits. We had a whole tub of carrots which we never finished using. I don't know why I didn't take pictures of the other animals but there was 1 kangaroo, which was very lazy and wasn't interested in food at all, many birds, Alpacas or Lamas and I don't remember what else.

It wasn't very enjoyable so we didn't spend much time with those animals because firstly, the place kinda stinks. Secondly, the weather was really really HOT and the HUGE FLIES were darn irritating. It's your normal houseflies but like triple in size. And there were MANY! They wouldn't leave you alone and attack you whenever you're outside. It got worse when it's near the animals because that is where most of the flies are. Someone told us that those flies were carried in by the wind from the dessert. Well, just because of this reason, it was a wrong time to visit WA. Never ever go in the Summer! As I would no doubt mention again later on, hot weather, we can tolerate, pestering giant flies, we could not.

We learnt that flies like the sun. So in the shady areas, there were less. So we would try to find shade whenever possible. But it's not easy when we want to go to the beach, park, feed animals, playground etc. Ok, I've just devoted a long paragraph to the flies issue so you can see, it was a really big problem for us. Aidan was very irriated as well and he would let out yell now and then out of frustration with flies on his face that wouldn't go away.

Ok so you know, shady area. Haha...the best thing on this Country Life Farm was this NEW indoor playground/gym!!! It's really fantastic. Sg has got so many of these places, Pollywogs, Fidgets, Go Go Bambini and this one beats them all hands down. The place itself isn't as big as Pollywogs but the equipments are so much more exciting! It's compact and yet so many things to explore and play. They even segregated out the areas according to age group. This is one of the main gripe I have about local ones because I get very worried when the very big kids would play together with the small kiddos and big kids are rough so I never leave Aidan out of my sight.

Regretted didnt have many pictures here to show you what I meant. Partly because I was so happy to finally have the opportunity to rest outside the play area while Aidan played inside.

Ok, this has got to be Aidan's haven. He loves these cars and over here, there are sooo many!

It's funny how he decided to push all the car to one side and park them in a neat row.

Look at how neatly the cars are parked. Well done.

So it's off to lunch! Just look at the yummy lamb chops! One of the best I've ever had! Food is really expensive in WA and I couldn't bear to spend so much in one seating so we ordered just this and a pizza to share. What a big mistake. I could gobble this one down all by myself and have seconds. Instead, we shared this one and I really wanted more very badly. Sigh...If it was in Sg, I would have ordered another. But in WA, food takes really really long to get served. It's usually a 30min wait each time.

The pizza was ok. I ordered it more for Aidan but I ate some because I was still very hungry having my tastebuds tickled by the lamb chops.

After a great but unfulfilled lunch, we decided we ought to go for ice cream at Simmons. A famous ice-creamery in WA. Many variety of ice-cream and Aidan being in his purple phase had to choose a colour like this. He said purple but it's actually pink.

It didn't last long because Daddy tried to have a bite and Aidan wouldn't let go and the entire cone dropped onto the floor.

Vacation in WA- Day05

It's goodbye to Perth for abit while we go down South to the Margaret River region. Not looking forward to the long 4 hours drive but excited and looking forward to our farmstay.

Aidan just woke up and eating grapes (I think)

Very pleased with his grapes

No pictures in between cos we were cooped up in our car! We had several pitstops so it took almost 6 hours to reach at Busselton.

This is the Busselton Jetty. Too bad we could only walk part of it as it's under construction till March 10. There's supposed to be an underwater observatory at the end of the jetty, I think it would've been marvelous. What a pity.

We love the beach at Busselton. I feel quite upset that I didn't take any pictures of the beach. Very gentle lapping waves, crystal clear water and pristine sand. I wish we have beach like that here. I think it's the ideal beach chill and relax beach. We had a great time picking seashells there the next day.

After walking the jetty, we spotted a HUGE playgroud. It's really huge, like a park! I really liked it and of course so did Aidan.