It’s really nice being in self catering for a couple of nights after having to have hotel breakfasts for the last week or so – It’s so much easier with a toddler rather than having to be constrained by specific times, or having to make sure they’re on best behaviour three times a day!
Today, therefore, started off okay – after a quick breakfast we headed off into the nearest town, Cowes, to do a bit of shopping and then to have a coffee and a play on the beach for Wills.
Phillip Island is tiny and you can drive from one side to another in about 15 mins, so after coffee we zoomed off to the far side of the island to something called the Nobbies Centre (chortle). From here you can supposedly sometimes see seals on the nearby Seal Rocks but not today (and we weren’t going to spend $5 to see a live video!). The only thing we did spend some money on was a new hoodie for Wills because we’d left his other one in the coffee shop and it was freezing outside (yes, in Australia)!
After zooming back to Cowes, to pickup the lost hoodie, we zoomed to the other side of the island to Churchill Island – here there was a beautiful old restored farmhouse but it does make me chuckle everytime we go into an “old” house over here though and we see preserved things that we just take for granted back at home – like a beautifully preserved door that’s identical to the ones we’ve got in our modest little Victorian terraced house in Tunbridge Wells.
There’s also a, fairly sanitised, working farm with cows, horses, chickens, wallabies etc. Whilst at the farm, William decided to get an obsession with the horse having a poo – he kept asking the horse if he was having one and then decided to sit and wait to see. If only he could sit as long on the potty himself (or at all actually!)
We dropped into a Koala conservation place on the way back to our chalet which was quite interesting as there were boardwalks that took you fairly high up into the trees, allowing you to get up a bit closer to the koalas. It was a standard William whistle-stop tour at 100 miles an hour – all he wanted to do was to walk over the Billy Goat’s Gruff “Trip Trap” bridge!
One of the things that Mel and myself had been really looking forward to seeing on the holiday, and the main attraction on Phillip Island, are the fairy penguins. Every night, just after dusk, they all march ashore in large numbers to return to the nests for the night. We had been warned in advance that this was a fairly commercial affair, but all the money goes back into the conservation of the penguins and without this, as happened back in the 40s and 50s, the nests would be destroyed through housing development and other human encroachments. On entering the foyer though, it did seem like we were about to go and watch a film at the cinema than a natural spectacle!
We did end up seeing the penguins, but not how we imagined, as Master Walker decided to disappear and the aforementioned Devil Child paid us another visit. Literally as the penguins were about to walk up the beach he shouted, screamed and generally had a proper toddler tantrum for the duration – meaning we had to take him, and us, away early. Hilariously, he got into his head that he wanted a milkshake (as this is his favourite “special” treat on holiday), and through sobs and tears he kept on repeating how much he wanted one over, and over, and over, and over again. We did see some of the penguins and they were very cute, but maybe not one to do with a volatile toddler!