Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie

We are doing yesterday's and today's entry together.
Yesterday, we had breakfast at DeBernales and a visit to Everett Butcher. An amazing butcher with about the best pies and sausage rolls we've ever had. Proper chunky pieces of steak in their pies. Then lots of mundane chores to catch up on in Kalgoorlie, like the washing, airing the wet tent, charging up devices and tool batteries and last but not least cleaning, vacuuming the car. Once we got all that done, we were just happy to sit and watch Netflix until dinner time. We had dinner at The Balcony Restaurant at the Palace Hotel where Herbert Hoover stayed before he was President of the United States of America. He was working as a manager of a gold mine in Kalgoorlie and became thoroughly smittened by a bar maid here. He infact was so besotted, he even wrote a poem about his tryst with her.

Today was an easy going day where we decided to take a drive to Coolgardie which was once the third largest town in Western Australia during the Gold Rush years. Ruby and I were intrigued with the golden pipeline that delivers water from Mundaring in Perth all the way to Kalgoorlie, 650km of pipe. The project was commissioned in 1896 and completed in 1903, at a cost of almost $6million. It was much needed as water in the goldfields then costed more than whisky.

There were churches, a mosque and a synagogue in Coolgardie. Coolgardie is also famed for the Coolgardie safe that was used to preserve food before the time of refrigeration. There was also a great museum in Coolgardie. Like Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie had very wide roads and beautiful architecture. After lunch we got a self guided audio walking tour of Kalgoorlie and Boulder from the visitors centre. We heard about the history, notoriety and fame of the buildings in the main street called Hannan Street, and tomorrow we will continue a few more buildings in Kalgoorlie and finish the Boulder part of the tour. We had Thai for dinner and are now turning in for the night.Read more