Australia - part 1!

It's about time I showed some pictures of my time away in Australia!
Me, my brother (Colin), my cousin (Aishling) and her friend (Conall) headed off to Perth in Western Australia to stay with another cousin (Leanne - Aishling's sister) and her husband (Peter).
Now the introductions are over here's some pics!

We went on an open top bus tour around Perth and saw lots of buildings that meant something at the time, so I have lots of photo's of buildings and I don't know what they are!  So here's one of the main part of the city!

Here's one that I do know - this is the bell tower in Perth down by the water.  Notice the lovely blue sky - Perth was having a heat wave when we arrived and it was 40 degrees C!  Hot hot hot!!

This is the Swan river.  Lot's of places and things in Perth are named after the river.

We were stopped at traffic lights beside this man who I presume is a television reporter.  He waved at me so I thought I'd give him a wave back and took a photo.  Let me know if you recognise him! lol!

Then we had a little adventure!  Through the tour there were times when it was windy so Colin took his has off so he wouldn't lose it.  It's a special hat as he bought it when we were at the Belgian Grand Prix a couple of years ago and it supports Felipe Massa - our favourite driver.  We were stopped at traffic lights where there was no wind so he had put the hat back on when all of a sudden there was a gust of wind that whipped the hat off his head, over the top of us behind him onto the road just as the bus took off!  All we could do was watch as it landed on the road behind us in the oncoming traffic.

Look, no hat!

But don't worry, we got it back!  After a bit of a walk, in the heat, so we had a wee sit down by the river.

 

Then we had a wee walk through the city.  This is Aishling enjoying the shade!

I love seeing all the different wildlife - Australia's is amazing!  Get used to seeing more pictures like this!  These are Rainbow Lorikeets hanging up-side-down in the palm tree.

This is down at the Marina.  Beautiful sunsets every night.  Pity my camera isn't great in low light.

Of course we had to have a barbi!  The fantastic chef is the lady of the manor, Leanne.

And you can't beat a wee dip in the pool - day or night!

The beaches are amazing although it was a tad windy and we ended up having a natural exfoliation with the sand blowing round us!

Our competitive edge came out when we went bowling.  I'm not very good!  That's all I'll say on that matter!

Then Colin and I left the rest of them in Perth and headed off to Melbourne to stay with some friends and go to the Grand Prix!

We arrived in Melbourne to be greeted by images of the Grand Prix even at the airport!

And we spent most of our time in Melbourne at the Formula One...

This is the end of the pit lane, the light tells the drivers if it's safe to procede or that a session has started and they can enter the track.

This is walking the wrong way up the pit lane.

This is the podium - taken on Thursday before the race so no-one was on it yet!

The Aussie driver - Mark Webber's pit garage, so there was quite a swarm of fans around it!

My favourite driver, Felipe Massa's garage where there were very few fans standing about - the Ferrari garage is usually the one swarming with fans at the european races.

That's inside Felipe's garage.  Unfortunately, that's not really him standing at the back, it's a cardboard cut-out!

Probably the most famous driver of the moment - Micheal Schumacher's Mercedes garage.

Another famous name in Senna, but this one is Ayrton's nephew Bruno's garage.  The first time the name has been on a Williams garage since Ayrton was tragically killed in 1994.

The safety and medical cars parked up ready for the action of the weekend ahead.

This is where the cars and drivers are weighed.  The drivers make their way to here after the race to get weighed.

This is the view from our seat in the grand stand of the sign over the start/finish straight.

No, this isn't Jenson Button on the podium.  It's Colin imitating the famous Schumacher jump on another, slightly smaller, podium!

Some of the buildings in the city of Melbourne.

This is the beautiful building of Flinders Street Station, where we got our train every day!

There were aerial displays each day of the race weekend.  This was on Friday.  As you can see, it was a little cloudy on Friday!

But it made the planes easy to see!

 A Formula One car!  This is Fernando Alonso in his Ferrari!

And this is Micheal Schumacher in his Mercedes!

Then the rather cloudy sky decided it wanted to empty itself all over us!  We got very, very wet!

Thankfully it dried up again and cars were able to take to the track again.  This is Felipe Massa in his Ferrari.  It's quite difficult to get photo's of the cars as they go past cos they're so fast.  But I got the hang of it!

Lightning McQueen also put in an appearance!  My nephew, Ryan, was stunned when he seen this, he couldn't believe I actually met Lightning McQueen!

Saturday was a far better day weather-wise than Friday and the aerial display had a bluer background.

They got quite far away!

Michael Schumacher went off the track right in front of us during practice..  He ended up standing just beside our stand.  Colin got a great photo of him, I'll add it when I get a copy of it.

So after qualifying on Saturday we headed into the city to celebrate St. Patrick's Day!  We met a penguin playing the bag-pipes on the "Wonky Bridge"!

And then we found an Irish pub that we could get into and had a good night's craic!

But then it went a bit pear-shaped!

Not really!  We went to The Old Melbourne Gaol and saw where Ned Kelly was taken to after he was captured and where he was executed.  We also saw his death mask which is a mould that is taken of the head after the execution.  I found it to be a bit creepy.

This is a praying Mantis which we found in an orange tree at the back of our friends house.

On our last morning in Melbourne we went kangaroo spotting.  We did see one roo in the wild but it was too quick to get a photo of it.  We also saw lots of countryside.

I had to get a photo of this sign that shows Melbourne on one side and Heathmont on the other - which is the suburb where we were staying.

So after that we headed on to Sydney.  I'll continue with more photo's in the next post.

Thanks for looking!