Amerigo Vespucci

May 10th Marian Dot James Anne and I went to Perth by bus for a ride back to Fremantle on a boat up the Swan River. The Skyline shot is a picture of Perth from the boat on the Swan River. It is a very nice ride very picturesque with lovely homes all along the river to Fremantle. On our way approaching the docks in Fremantle the Captain comes on the loudspeaker and says to watch out for another ship at the docks, the tall ship Amerigo Vespucci which he has a hard time saying. I ask the others witch me if they know what Amerigo Vespucci was famous for and no one knows. So I tell them a little trivia. Amerigo Vespucci was Christopher Columbus's navigator, and that is who the Americas are named after. We were advised by the Captain that Amerigo Vespucci was an actual Italian Navy Ship built in 1939 and was on a goodwill tour around the world, and that it would be open for people to go on it and look around, and check it out.

We did go to see the ship and go on board, and it was a beautiful sailing ship with all the sailors dressed up as they would have been in 1939 when the ship was built. After boarding the ship and looking around we went by train from Fremantle to the Subrisco Market on the edge of Perth. Later that night we went to a Piano Recital at the Town Concert Hall of Medina the neighboring town to Rockingham where Marian lives. I never kept track of or wrote the Pianist's name down and don't remember it but he was the spitting image of and sounded like a young Arlo Guthrie, when Guthrie was wearing and Afro.

May 15th Marian got her car back repaired after the collision when Sandra was using it. This is the end of my diary while there so it was within a few days that we were to try and return home, and I use the term try, because we didn't know if they would let us back in the country because SARS was raging wildly in Hong Kong and we had to to through Hong Kong to get home.

We did make it home OK with little aggravation and because of the problems going to Australia a room was provided for our overnight stay in the hotel attached to the airport, with breakfast provided in the morning.

As this information was taken from a diary I wrote while in Australia it is pretty dry and next year during the winter I will revisit it and edit it properly, but I am glad to be finished with it for now. Australia is a great place to visit but to do all the things I would have liked to do I would have had to either buy or rent a car which was my plan until I found out how much that would cost, and now back to my life story, as I saw it.