Weekend in Perth

Jimmy had to spend a week in Perth (Western Australia) for work and then had to go to Sydney the next week so I decided to go join him over the weekend.  It's about a 5 hour flight from Singapore but its in the same time zone since its directly south of us.  This was my first time going to the Southern Hemisphere.  This trip actually had a lot of firsts for me.  Since Jimmy was staying at a hotel about half hour outside of the city we decided it would be best if I got a rental car when I arrived.  That meant I would have to drive on the right side of the car in the left lane!  I have to admit I was pretty nervous about this.  I kept worrying I would make a turn into the wrong lane.  Fortunately we had no issues - the one thing both of us kept messing up was the turn signal.  We're used to the turn signal being used with the left hand but the way the car is set up there you use your right - so every time we went to do the turn signal we'd end up setting the wind shield wipers off!

It was close to 8 by the time I got there so we just went to a restaurant close by for dinner.  Saturday we spent the day exploring.  We started by walking around our resort to see kangaroos - they were lounging around all over the golf course.  I'm glad we were at the resort out of the city, otherwise we probably wouldn't have seen any all weekend.

From there we went to Scarborough beach.  The beaches stretch on for miles and the water is beautiful shades of blue/teal.  The weather there was in the high 90's since it is summer there now.

We went south about half hour to check out Fremantle which is more of a small port town.  They had some cute shops and we stopped by a local brewery.  We were surprised that most of the restaurants we went to didn't have A/C  - especially with how hot it was.  There was usually a little breeze but not enough to keep you cool.

After Fremantle, we headed toward the city and saw the Bell Tower, walked by Swan River and walked around downtown.  All weekend we noticed that Perth was pretty casual.  So we went to get a drink at a bar downtown that had good reviews around 6 and the guy out front just kept looking us up and down and told us that a different bar on the top floor was good.  I finally asked if the bar we wanted to go to had a dress code and he said yes - here we were in a casual city being refused to get in because we weren't dressed up enough!  We ended up going to the bar on the top floor which was a nice open air roof top bar.

At our resort, we were on the first floor and there was a patio out back.  Around 2 in the morning, we were woken up by a noise at the patio door.  My first thought was a kangaroo was banging into our door.  Jimmy looked out and a man was trying to open the door!  After a minute he stopped and just sat on a chair on the patio.  We are pretty sure he was drunk and was at the wrong room.  We were just glad it wasn't the night before because the A/C in the room would shut off over night so we had left the door open Friday night to get a breeze in - if we had left the door open again, this guy would have come right in!!

Our hotel was in Swan Valley which is a food and wine trail so we spent Sunday checking out restaurants and wineries.  We also stopped at a chocolate factory!  I think our trips to Napa have been turning me into a wine snob because there weren't many wines I really liked but it was still a fun day.