The unexpected...

"Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn't meant to take."

- Angela N. Blount

     Tuesday I went back up to Perth.  Originally I was just going to go up for one day to meet up with one of my friends from Copenhagen, Lucy.  Then I decided to take two more days and go on a daytrip while I was there.  

The first stop on my tour was to Caversham Wildlife Park, and I got to pet a koala!  Weirdly the koala's fur feels kind of like a lamb.

 And a wombat!!!!! These guys are so cute and fat! But they had signs saying that they are supposed to look like this and that they are a healthy weight.  These guys are also marsupials, so they have a pouch for their baby but because they dig burrows their pouch opening is by their butt.

 This is a possum, which is no relation to the North American opossum which is a hideous and scary looking thing, but these guys are adorable!

The bird is a kookaburra.  When I was little we learned a song about a kookaburra sitting in a gum tree and I thought it was a made up animal.  Turns out its real. 

No matter how many kangaroos I see, they will always amaze me! Look at the babies just chilling halfway in the mom's pouches.

 For lunch we went to a vineyard.  This area is a big wine making region so there are hundreds of wineries around the area.

The point of the trip was to visit a place called the pinnacles.  Its a desert with these crazy rock formations, there are hundreds of thousands of these rock pillars throughout the park.  Its very weird that these only formed here in this one place.   

Here is a guy explaining how these formed.

So now we know how they formed but I'm still wondering why only here?

The erosion on the pillars is also really cool to look at.

This one has fallen over, and looks like a fish!

After the Pinnacles we went sandboarding! Its just like snowboarding, minus the cold. 

This is a naturally occurring sand dune a couple of miles inland from the coast.  The sand was perfect soft white powder!

How weird is it that this is not snow?

So on the way back to Perth from our exciting day, the tour guide pointed out an arena and mentioned that a tennis tournament was going on there and that the previous day Serena Williams had played Roger Federer. I didn't leave Perth until 6:00PM the next day so I though I would have a look at how much tickets were, and they were only $40! So I spent a day watching this amazing woman play tennis!

Now I have no interest in tennis and after an hour, I was ready for the game to be over.  But it was incredible to see one of the greatest athletes ever play!

Serena won her singles match against this British woman.

Then we were onto the mixed doubles game.

Unfortunately they lost but it was still cool to watch. 

Her husband and daughter were there, too! 

Here's some videos of the trip; sandboarding, tennis (because its pretty boring I sped up a point to 30 seconds just so you can see), and the last part is the crazy 7 month old that I am watching who thinks he can start walking now!

It was such an unexpected thing and turned out to be the highlight of my little trip.  Now on Sunday, we will begin the 16 hour drive to our new home of Karratha! I'm sure I will have lots of stories and pictures from the drive!