Swan Valley

3years 350days

Today we drove over to the stunning Swan Valley region, just outside of Perth. Known as one of the smaller but wine regions near Perth, it has lots of vineyards (wineries) and breweries, cheese makers, ice cream makers, chocolate factory, fruit sellers and more. We started out taking the children to the Small Animal farm. They had a fantastic petting area, where the children could sit in with baby ducks, guinea pigs, rabbits, lambs and feed them from buckets of feed and salad provided. They all bottle fed lambs and goats. They had repeated rides on the tractor train. They played on the big bouncy castle and park areas. We went in to visit the cows, the alpacas, small cows and pigs, the goats - all of which you walk in amongst. There were a couple of rescue kangaroos, but we scooted Katie past without seeing those as we had a plan for her first time of seeing them! They spent a very long morning at the farm in the end.

We dragged them away midafternoon to take them to Mash, one of the breweries, for a lunch. They played in the play area while we waited for the food. Katie had requested fish and mash. She ate a mountain of both. She's really loving the australian fish.

Lunch scoffed, we headed to the Margaret River chocolate factory. The children lined up and filled their hands, and our hands, with big scoops of free chocolate buttons. Then returned to the queue to do it again. They had extremely yummy ice creams before then running through the vineyards for a while. It ended with a few tears as Katie fell and scrubbed her hands, her knees, her nose. But the chocolate was *that* good that it all faded away very quickly after a couple more chocolate buttons.