Sights around Albany town, Western Australia

For our Christmas trip to Perth, we decided to do something different from the usual catch-ups and meetings with families and friends: a road trip down to Albany and the nearby towns Denmark and Walpole. Albany is about a 5-hour drive from metro Perth, and I hogged the driving for the whole trip! I hadn't driven a car in over 5 years (except during short trips to Perth once yearly), and I really missed driving. However after driving about 14 hours over a 57-hour period, I was more than happy to hand the driving over to hubby. We invited my parents along on the trip so that they could have some quality time with their grandson, and the boy had so much more fun with them than if he had to spend all that time by himself in the backseat of the car. The road trip was a nice change from what we always do whenever we go to Perth, and it was good for our 4-year-old to surround himself with the countryside, trees and beaches (but he absolutely hated the flies, and there were many!). We arrived in Albany around 3pm in the afternoon, and after checking-in and dumping our luggage at the hotel, we took a wander around town on foot. Albany is the oldest permanently settled town in Western Australia, and I must admit that I enjoyed the laidback lifestyle and open space a lot more now that I'm living in busy, hectic and crowded Hong Kong.

The iconic Town Hall building on York Street:

Another Albany icon - the Dog Rock. I intentionally included its surroundings to give you an idea of how big this rock is. There's a motel and a shopping centre named after this rock:

We dropped by the local Woolworths supermarket to pick up some breakfast for the next day, and I was pleased to find that the supermarket was large and well-stocked. We grabbed some food for dinner to have in our hotel, and after dinner, hubby, the boy and myself went out for an evening stroll to cover other parts of town.

Off in the distance, as the sun was setting, we could spot the windmills from the nearby Wind Farm that we would visit the following day. The boy counted 12, and I suppose the remaining 6 weren't visible from town:

We came across an offsite location of the University of WA (both hubby and I graduated from the main campus of UWA). This is a heritage site with a clock tower with four clock faces:

A pedestrian bridge:

That's our boy running across the wide bridge:

Walking through and mulling over the words at the ANZAC Peace Park:

More photos of our road trip to follow!