G'day and bonjour you lucky people! You've landed smack bang in the middle of a Stephen blog! Oh YES, I hear you say despite your salivating in anticipation. Oh yes indeed, but be further intrigued with the knowledge that Leah has allowed me complete control of what I post here! This could get messy! I have digressed marginally from my blogging I fear, so with no further ado...

Last Friday was spent watching a hybrid of Aussie Rules Football and Gaelic Football called International Rules Football, at Subiaco Oval. Ireland whooped Australia by a huge margin of 45 to 44 points! Ooooooh, close one! Surprisingly, the queue for beers was quite a long one... trust the Irish and the Aussies to live up to national stereotypes. I felt ashamed not to be wearing a kilt and sneaking in a bottle of buckfast!

Last Saturday night was spent at Abbamania, just on the outskirts of Perth, which was a west end musical recreating Abba's last ever concert and was a lot of fun.

The next couple of days was spent organising a trip to Albany on the south west coast of Australia, to hopefully do a whale watching cruise. This never quite happened due to the whales deciding to be in a completely different place from where we were going but we dondered off down to Albany regardless.

Albany is a very pleasant place although the weather reminded me a little too much of Scotland. Dreich is a fitting word for conditions for our first two days and an attempt to do the scenic walk was abandoned pretty sharpish as thunder, lightning and half the southern ocean hitting us from the skies hampered our efforts.

However, we hired a car and explored the coast in greater detail than would have been possible with public transport. We ripped down the Great Southern Highway (comparable to the A9 so quite how great is matter of debate) and visited a wee town called Denmark. Denmark has the town motto "Here lies Queen of the South's UEFA cup dreams 2008". A strange motto I thought!

We saw delights that you will never have heard of such as Misery Beach, Conspicuous Cliffs, the Blowholes, the Gap, Natural Bridge, Cosy Corner Beach (where a wild bandicoot was witnessed), Dog Rock, Greens Pool, Elephant Rocks and a particular highlight which was a tree top walk through a forest of giant Tingle trees. This was shaky and vertigo inducing but we coped admirably despite our conditions!

We finally reached the town of Walpole, affectionally known by some Frenchman as the bellybutton of the world. I would better describe it as the near the END of the world as no humanity seemed to live beyond its boundaries. The undoubted highlight of Walpole was it's WOW Eco-Adventure Tour. The guy who ran it, "the legend" Gary Muir (TLGM) was one of the best tour guides I have ever seen. TLGM was both funny and knowledgeable - if you ever end up in Walpole (somehow - to be honest, I don't really know how we ended up there), I recommend it thoroughly! The main difference between us and marsupials - it's all about the bladder apparently!

On the road between Denmark and Walpole was an Alpaca farm where we got to feed some baby lambs, camels (don't try it - very slobbery animals), goats, sheep and of course Alpacas! We also got to hold a six month old kangaroo that had literally lost its mother in the wild and was rescued. It's name was Madeleine, not Joey.

Anyway, we got back to Perth and met up with Leah's cousin, Dawn and her family Wayne, Steele and Sage. We were made to feel very welcome and Leah now has a bit more of an idea of who is actually in her impressively large family!

It looks like we may be heading eastward to Kalgoorlie and Adelaide tomorrow on the Indian Pacific train. We'll keep updating here with blogs and pics. We're lonely people though, and we do check our message board at least every couple of days to find no messages and we both die a little bit more inside. So, go on, pleeeeaase leave us a message!

Goodbye and au revoir!

Stephen