Geraldton Revisited

We spent a week at Geraldton, and experienced much better weather than we did last year here (see blog post here). Blue skies and sunshine almost every day, but several days of incredibly strong winds would have kept any visiting wind surfers happy. Unfortunately the days of the strongest winds also corresponded to the ones when we played golf, but the 2 courses in town are good enough quality that we enjoyed the games anyway.

While in Geraldton we did several local tours run by volunteer guides. Firstly we went to the St Francis Xavier Cathedral, the magnificent Catholic cathedral designed by priest-architect Monsignor John Hawes. Having learnt all about the priest's life when we were at Mullewa recently, we were interested to see his most famous creation, and it didn't disappoint. We also did a tour of the HMAS Sydney memorial, which commemorates the sinking of this ship in WWII by the German ship the Kormoran with the loss of all hands. We visited this memorial the last time we were in Geraldton, but were given a much more intimate insight into the design of the memorial and the incident it commemorates by a very interesting volunteer guide.

We also went to the local meteorological office to see the launch of the daily weather balloon. We had been to the met office in Ceduna a month ago, but decided that, as the tour is free, you can't have too much weather. We were glad we did - in Ceduna there were a couple of dozen grey nomads on the tour which was run by a very jaded old hand on the brink of retirement, but here at Geraldton we were the only ones and the weather guru was fresh faced and enthusiastic. He showed us all the high- and low-tech equipment, then filled the balloon with hydrogen and sent it on its way up to the stratosphere.

Just for a change of pace, we headed back to the Chapman Valley winery in the Chapman Valley just north of Geraldton, for a lovely long lunch and to refill the supplies with some nice wine.