Monday 28th April

This is the last entry from the land of OZ! We will finish off the blog from home so don’t all forget to see the final FINAL entry – and of course, there’ll still be the quiz to see how much notice you’ve been taking!?!

It’s been quite a relaxed day with a late start and early finish. We packed up the last lot of brochures and paper memorabilia and sent them home by post thus saving us excess baggage charges – we hope! We had the only bad experience of service we’ve had here when we went to Miss Maud’s for our usual daily break. We ordered coffee and stickies and the coffee arrived quite quickly, but the stickies just never appeared. We got fed up with waiting, finished our coffees and left – hungry! We did complain but they didn’t seem to be bothered. Pity it happened on our last day.

We then tried out one of the other free bus routes to get to the Perth Mint

and had a good visit there. There is the inevitable commemorative sculpture outside, and in an inner courtyard is a diorama of a gold camp, but there is a photo ban inside all of the buildings so we were unable to take pics inside. We watched a gold pour, which was exactly like Silvertown, and saw lots of gold nuggets and gold and silver coins. I can understand how gold fever can take hold of people – it has an attraction all of its own in all its forms. I am now the proud owner of a very special necklace thanks to my travelling companion, who has gained himself lots of brownie points!!

Having missed out on our stickies earlier, we enjoyed afternoon tea at the Mint instead – much nicer than Miss Maud’s.

We missed one bus by a matter of minutes so walked to the next stop, which just happened to be beside an Australian souvenir shop, so had a little wander round to pass the time. Tom found some very rude T-shirts, which he couldn’t resist – some of you will no doubt suffer them when he’s home!

We had a tour of West Perth on the Red Cat before alighting to visit 2 of the arcades we’d missed – we can now say we have visited ALL the shopping arcades that the centre of Perth has to offer! I’d like to add at this point that it’s not just been my choice to do this – Tom has developed a liking for the shops here. One of the last ones we went into was an Aboriginal Art and Artefacts shop where one of the salesmen was playing the didgeridoo – quite well as far as we could tell. Tom had a go too and was praised for his technique – no, we are not bringing one home!! There is a limit!

So we had our last walk through the centre and caught the Blue Cat back here. Tom is now in the bath while I write the day’s adventures up and send some last e-mails.

Having been bite-free for the last few weeks, we have BOTH been nibbled in these last few days – that’s only the second time I’ve been eaten and whatever it was is horrid! We’ve got red lumpy itchy blotches to suffer on the flights! Talking of itching, if you are thinking of travelling here, bring Antisan or the equivalent because there are no antihistamine creams sold in Australia. You can buy antihistamine pills but no creams.

We will be off-line for the next 2 days and home, hopefully on Wednesday when we will finish off this marathon blog. You can all breathe sighs of relief that your days will revert to tomandmaggie-free – until the next stage of the adventure! Byee!

AAAARGH! I’VE JUST FOUND THE MISSING HATS! I cannot believe this. We both checked the suitcases thoroughly (we thought!) but both missed the internally-zipped lid of one of them. I have just started to pack up and found the b****y things!! So now Tom’s got FOUR new hats to add to his Tilley.