A wedding

Our daughter Helen is to marry James in December. James rang me last week and asked for my permission. Isn’t that very traditional? Of course I gave him ‘permission’. A few minutes later he confessed that he would have married her anyway, even if I objected. I like his style!
The wedding is going to be very small...around 20 guests with a celebrant in a park and lunch at a riverside restaurant ‘The Red Herring’. The Red Herring is a quite old restaurant starting out as oyster beds in the early part of the last century. Great spot with much to see as the rich folks cruise past in their ships.

On Sunday James and Helen came down and we went for a drive around a few sites we thought would be a nice setting for the short ceremony. Along the Swan River there are many lovely small picturesque venues suitable for a wedding ceremony....some of them below the monstrous houses of the wealthy..very wealthy! As my mum would say... ‘Where do they get the money?’

The site we all liked most were the gardens at Minim Cove. The ponds are fed by an artesian bore across the river. I previously briefly wrote about the gardens here. It is a great spot and those who know about it aren’t spilling the beans to all and sundry. When we were there on a nice sunny day on Sunday (is that coincidental?) there was not a single person enjoying the place. Even if there are other people about on the day, the gardens have many places suitable for the ceremony and river views for later photographs.

Yesterday I took the ‘Instructional’ flight in a Royal Aero Club Cessna 152. A beaut little plane, and I mean little. The pilot was a young guy and a bit bigger than me. If we were slightly larger it would have been a very comfy situation. Joan and Helen gifted me the flight for my 70th birthday and I had to take it now as the year is almost up since then.

I didn’t take my Nikon DSLR camera and foolishly took a $88 digital compact camera. The photos show why a good camera cost much more. We flew south for about 30 minutes and the view was great. As we flew over our neighbor Dave's business site I had the pilot do a go around and I took a couple of pics to give Dave. Sadly the quality is too poor to enlarge.
Doing a 'touch and go' on a regional airstrip.
Shoalwater bay and Penguin Island.

As for the ‘Instructional’ part of the flight I gave it a miss. I have done that before a few times in Papua New Guinea and I really did want to observe what we were flying over. When we are flying on a commercial flight and we don’t get a window seat I get really angry when I see some ‘seasoned traveller’ who never looks out the window.

Joan is getting stronger daily and we hope she will be ‘running on all cylinders’ for the wedding. She has done quite a lot of walking over the last few days and whilst she has found it very tiring, she is getting better only using her walker over longer distances.