Posted by: @courtenay

Hope you enjoy Perth. Are you there for business, or do you have family there?   

It's a family trip- I was born in Perth; my parents and siblings live there.

Posted by: @davidd

It's a family trip- I was born in Perth; my parents and siblings live there.

Woohooo, another Aussie NarniaWebber!   I think that makes four of us currently active here — me, you, @pete and @waggawerewolf27. I was born in outer suburban Melbourne but grew up in Inverloch, a bit further south-east along the coast. My parents still live there and my sister lives in Melbourne. I now live in the UK (Cheshire, to be more precise, in north-west England) and usually get back to Australia to visit family and friends once a year.

Meanwhile, living in the homeland of so many literary icons (including so many of my favourites from childhood) is just awesome. Being able to visit not only C.S. Lewis's former home and college in Oxford, but Beatrix Potter's house and Arthur Ransome's favourite areas in the Lake District, Jane Austen's house in Hampshire, Rudyard Kipling's house and A.A. Milne's "Poohsticks Bridge" in Sussex, the real-life Watership Down...

Ooer, yeah, and as this is the weather thread, I had better add that today in Cheshire East and southern Greater Manchester, it's been alternately rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny (etc.) pretty much all day.  

@courtenay   Being able to visit not only C.S. Lewis's former home and college in Oxford, but Beatrix Potter's house and Arthur Ransome's favourite areas in the Lake District, Jane Austen's house in Hampshire, Rudyard Kipling's house and A.A. Milne's "Poohsticks Bridge" in Sussex, the real-life Watership Down...

Yes, I did that, too, or at least some of the places you mentioned. In 1997, when my husband & I finally got to go to UK, together, that is just what I did. We went to the Lakes District to see a museum near Bowness, where they had a boat tied up to the jetty, all done up for Captain Flint's birthday party, complete with stuffed parrot. We also visited a diorama display for Beatrix Potter, and along with Geoffrey Trease & Rosemary Sutcliffe's offerings, we explored York and Chester as well as Hadrian's Wall. 

But the day we went across Watership Down to Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum), it was raining, so we missed out on strolling around to enjoy the countryside, which we hoped to do. But it cleared up in the afternoon, we did get to walk round the Roman city walls, there, in a sleepy town with a rather small mobile library, and a bloke working on it, done up in plus fours & a handlebar moustache, looking like he'd stepped out of a P.G. Wodehouse book, who seemed amazed that we actually have mobile libraries in Australia (one we had in the 1960-1970's for City of Sydney Public Library was a semi-trailer, based at our Alexandria branch, at the back of Redfern). He also wanted to know if we knew someone or other who went to live in either Nambucca Heads or Narooma, hundreds of kms away on either side of Sydney.  

Back in Sydney, though it has stopped raining so much, and we had a relatively sparkling day, yesterday, it is still very overcast, & though I am dressed warmly, I'm still shivering with cold, when the temperature has barely risen from its morning 12C. But then, it is supposed to be winter. 

@davidd It's a family trip- I was born in Perth; my parents and siblings live there.

Wow! Welcome home. I've been to Perth, in 2009, to see some of the attractions, there, such as the Maritime Museum at Fremantle, where there is Willem De Vlamingh's pewter plate, left on Dirk Hartog's Island in place of Dirk Hartog's original 1616 pewter plate, as well as the hull of the Batavia, from where it was shipwrecked in the Houtman Abrolhos, and the America's cup-winning Australia II in 1983. We saw Wave Rock, the Pinnacles, as well as Rottnest Island's quokkas.