Perth, Western Australia: Mandurah Foreshore, Hotel Clipper, and More Family Catch Up

Perth, Western Australia: Mandurah Foreshore, Hotel Clipper, and More Family Catch Up - Day 9

The Mandurah Foreshore Train and Playground.

Mandurah foreshore train and playground. The train is not usually
this spooky it was still decorated for Halloween.

My Dad's Partner took Enigma and I on a trip down to the city of Mandurah for the morning. Mandurah is just under an hours drive from Perth, with a very nice foreshore area that has plenty to see and do beyond visiting the beach.

Stingray? Photo: Enigma

The plan was for my Dad's partner to keep an appointment she had with a friend in Mandurah, long before we even booked our trip, while Enigma and I checked out the foreshore area. After which we would meet up for lunch, and then go visit one of my step sisters and her family.

At the foreshore we were dropped off at the 30 minute parking bays just up from the enclosed Kwillena Gabi Pool, which is a safe swimming area that is fed water from the sea (although I don't think this area is looking directly out to sea, it's more of an inland water way. However Enigma did get a photo of a small stingray swimming by the walkway.

Kwillena Gabi Pool, Mandurah Foreshore.

From there we walked through the parkland to the foreshore cafes, gift shops, and art galleries.

Along the way we saw train tours (on a mini 'trackless' train), ferry boat tours, a 3D painting on the ground. We looked in a couple of galleries and gift shops.

While in one gift shop an older lady let the automatic doors open and she started a very loud conversation with the young girl behind the counter, a good distance away. She seemed preoccupied with people's star signs and asked the girl hers. The girl cheerfully played along. Seemed like this wasn't an out of the ordinary event.

After comparing star signs the lady moved along on her way. Later when we came out of the same shop I noticed this lady seemed to be with a group of older, possibly mentally challenged (just based on the fact that one of the older guys was pushing a shopping trolley around with another person in it commentating on what they should and shouldn't avoid), people and their carers. So maybe they were locals.

3D painting of a dolphin, pelican, sea lion, crab in or next to a pool.

This 3D painting is located just outside the Mandurah Tourist Information Center.

At about noon we met up with my Dad's partner and drove back to Rockingham (which I always thought was a city in its own right but is actually a suburb of Perth) to Hotel Clipper for lunch in their restaurant.

Clipper Bar and Café.
Photo: Clipper Hotel Website.

The restaurant/café area was pretty quiet with only one or two other guests the whole time we were there. I guess Wednesday lunch is pretty slow.

My Dad's Partner and Enigma both ordered pulled pork and slaw sliders (small burger buns), while I had a steak sandwich with tomato chutney, American cheddar, onion, tomato, rocket, aioli in toasted Turkish bread. All meals came with chips on the side. The food was very nice.

Afterward we ordered desert from the cake counter display. I had a cupcake of some sort, Enigma was served the biggest piece of banana and pineapple cake you've ever seen (almost a quarter of a round cake). We brought what she didn't eat home in a container. My Dad's Partner had a muffin of some kind.

From there we headed back in the direction of home with a side visit to one of my Step Sisters and her family. Both her daughter and son showed us their numerous medals in their chosen sports, Cheer Leading, and Golf.

By that time it was getting late so we all headed home proper for a quiet rest of our evenings.

Comments

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Ep 2 - Some Improvements

TET heelflip - looking better but still not a land. A s of writing this I've stuck to my plan of filming myself skate every second Sunday. By the time this post goes up I will have three episodes done. As part of that goal I am also skating more between episodes, about every second to third day for an hour, practicing Braille's Skateboarding Made Simple, Volume 1. That said, I'm not posting these videos here immediately after they're posted to my @TETLife YouTube Channel because I only post an article once a week, and that would make every second article a Sunday Session post. These posts are really so I can add some additional thoughts after the fact, and, of course, because this blog is about all things that interest me, of which skateboarding is one of them. In episode two I had intended to speak to camera more than I do but my driveway is right next door to my neighbor's shed/workshop, and I get a little self-conscious if I'm not too sure whether he's th...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...

The Australian Federal Election 2025 Could Be a Win For Independents

Australian Democrats founder, Senator Don Chipp, embodied the role of minor parties holding the balance of power with his quote of "keep the bastards honest." Photo Manipulated Caricature by TET. A s of writing this, the actual Australian Federal Election date has yet to be announced, as our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, attempts to keep the focus on the fallout of severe weather events in Queensland, however it's looking likely that some time in May is the safest bet. Despite this, all parties have been hard at campaigning, with smaller parties, and in particular, conservative independent candidates, seemingly rallying together to make sure people know how much influence they can have just by preventing the two major parties (Labor and the Liberal/National coalition) from having a majority in either (or both) houses of parliament. They're also doing their part to make sure voters finally understand that preferential voting works in everybody's favor over one ...

The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Image to Video Generator to Animate Art That Started as a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch

B ack in October of 2023 I used Prome AI's Sketch Rendering feature to color a 23 year old rough pen sketch I did of a princess watching butterflies, sitting next to a waterfall in the forest. You can read more about that in my previous article, The Princess' Butterflies - Using an AI Art Generator to Color and Enhance a 23 Year Old Rough Pen Sketch The three images I used to create my final image (bottom right). Notice how closely the AI has followed my line art sketch (top left) but in the first image (top right) has misinterpreted the waterfall as some kind of large tree stump. Prome's render of the artwork was pretty good but I did end up creating a composite image myself from two of the best renders, to get my final image. Since then AI Image to Video has come a long way, particularly when it comes to creating animation from artwork and maintaining the art style for the whole generation. AI still does much better with turning photographic images to video but I found ...

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) No Spoilers

T his is another film that I would have liked to have seen in a theatre but, for whatever reason, didn't get to. Having now seen Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) almost a year later I'm glad I didn't. Which is not to say it's bad. Like its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which I enjoyed in a cinema immensely, this film would definitely benefit from being on a big screen for the spectacle and epic visuals of it all. However unlike its predecessor there is so much going on, with back and forth between the waring parties, and Furiosa's story as well, you can't just sit back and kind of enjoy the ride. It's like writer/director, George Miller, wanted to cram in as many of his ideas as possible for the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max, because it's not likely he'll make another one, but whoever does, has a rich, detailed world of on screen source material to draw upon. The story begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) and her journey from the ...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog