Pat around Aus: I've been to Stonehenge!

On our way down to Esperance we stopped at Ravensthorpe and went to a wildflower show. On the road to Ravensthorpe we saw something very strange!

I wonder what happened with this truck?

I loved all the beautiful wildflowers at the show.

Royal Hakea

Old Man's Beard

My favourite was the Banksia flowers. The Banksia flowers were all different beautiful colours. There was even a model of a lady wearing a Banksia dress.

Nan’s favourites were the orchids especially the Purple Enamel Orchid.

I liked the Rabbit Orchid and the Snail Orchid the best.

Rabbit Orchid

Snail Orchid

On one of the tables there was a natural display where there was a real live Pygmy Possum called PP who was a pet of one of the ladies at the show. He was really tiny about the size of a 20 cent coin. He looked really fluffy and soft.

The story about the Pygmy Possum who was in the plastic container


I uploaded this photo from Flickr images so you could see what a pygmy possum looks like.

In the town of Esperance we went on a tour of the Mermaid Leather factory. The tour man showed us how they make leather out of shark, snapper and barramundi skins.

The snapper leather was really smooth and the shark leather was really rough because sharks don’t have scales but they have tiny teeth on their skin. These teeth are made of the same material as the shark’s big teeth. The shark’s skin leather was 7 times stronger than normal leather. It was really interesting to see how they made the leather out of the fish skins. They made lots of nice things out of the leather.

Some different shark's teeth at the factory

The factory even use the scales of the fish for craft

I saw this really cool Goblin Shark poster

After our tour we visited the Museum in Esperance. I saw a steam train, an olden day car and farm machinery, a 1918 Dodge motor car, a steam roller, displays of rooms from the old days and an old shop front, an old petrol bowser, and skulls of a camel and horse.

I also rang up Pop in an olden day telephone box.

I saw pieces of Skylab which was a space station that crashed back to Earth in remote Western Australia in 1979.

Skylab completed 34 981 orbits before crashing to earth on 13 July 1979. Many pieces were found were found in the town of Esperance and the surrounding farm areas.

I also saw a movie of Esperance in the 1950s. I really enjoyed my time in Esperance.

Old schoolhouse built in 1908 in Esperance

A tank I found outside the schoolhouse at Esperance

When we left Esperance we drove 45km east to Cape Le Grand National Park. The beach at Cape Le Grand was really nice because the water was a really sparkly turquoise blue and the sand was really white and felt like powder. There was lots of seaweed on the beach.

We also visited Stonehenge. It is a full size replica of the original Stonehenge in the United Kingdom but it wasn’t a ruin but looked how it would have looked when it was built hundreds of years ago. There were 137 stones of Esperance Pink Granite. You could hear really well in the middle of the big rock circle. It was fantastic!