Monty's Travels: A day in Albany

What a nice day we had in Albany. The town is about the same size as our home town, Norfolk, NE, about 25,000. It seems to be a regional market town. The scenery is much different being on the coast and in a hilly/rocky region. We went downtown to the CBD (central business district) for breakfast and wandered the streets for a little bit.

This is one of the downtown hotels.

A corner (at a round-about) with shops. Every block of the cbd has a round-about which moves traffic through the town much smoother that traffic lights (my opinion anyway).

I didn’t know these still existed, and yes there was a pay phone inside.

City Hall building

I have talked about public art we find in a lot of Australian towns and cities. Here is an example. We found these every few feet within the central business district.

Next we drove out the peninsula south of town (Torndirrup National Park) to look at some of the natural attractions. Our first stop was to view The Gap and Natural Bridge. This is an area of granite rock cliffs. Due to wave action and erosion, the rocks have been reshaped.

First is Natural Bridge. It was fun to watch the waves break under the bridge.

Next was The Gap, an area where the granite cliffs have collapsed..

You can go out to the viewing platform you see in the right of the above picture.

and watch the waves break and flow into the gap.

From there we went out to The Blowholes. Unfortunately, the wave action was not enough for water to be pushed up through the gap in the rocks. Here is Roy, point to the gap.

You could feel the air rushing up through the gap and had the waves been really strong, Roy would have been very wet from standing there. As you can see, there was lots of wave action, just not right for the blowholes.

It was still interesting to walk down to the blow holes and back. The views of the coast were stunning and the flowering plants along the trail were interesting. I can’t name all of the plants but here are some examples.

This and the next picture are a Banksia plant with the pods of various ages. The top picture are mature pods, where as the next picture is a pod just getting started.

These two are the Hollyleafed Banksia plant

Our next stop was at Stony Hill. Here you can walk among the protruding rocks. During WWII this hill had a radar site. This is a view across Princess Royal Harbour toward Albany.

While we were there a flock of black parrots flew over our heads. In the picture their heads are to the left.

Back in Albany we visited the Patrick Taylor Cottage. This cottage is believed to be the oldest colonial dwelling in Western Australia. It was built in 1832 and the original two rooms were wattle and daub construction.

From there we drove to Mt Clarence and the ANZAC memorial. This is a memorial to the Australian War dead, originally dedicated to the solders killed at Gallipoli.

The original statue was in Port Said, but was damaged during the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis. It was subsequently moved to Albany and reconstructed. It was from the Albany in 1914 that the ships carrying the solders from Australia and New Zealand left for the middle east and Gallipoli. It is a very awe inspiring memorial.

Our last stop of the day was at Dog Rock.

There is a story associated with the rock about a dog that saved a little girls life. The dog lost its life and was buried at the site of the rock. A storm came along and the rock in the shape of the dog’s head appeared.

On the menu this evening was lamb rump,