Friday Sept 12th, 2025
Our latest day in Kalgoorie and below shows you where we are in relation to the coast.
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was abut a game called “Two-up”. It is a very popular gambling game in Australia and betting on it is illegal except in this city. It is a very simple game and quite popular in the gold-mining camps. One person, called the “spinner” stands in the middle and tosses up 2 coins, usually pennies, and before they toss them people bet on how they will land. You can bet on both being heads or both being tails or “odds”, one of each. They sell special coins specifically to play Two-up.
At the gold mining museum they had a Two-up ring and Merv demonstrated the proper tossing technique.
On Friday we had another beautiful day and the weather is definitely warming up. I actually wore a short-sleeve shirt today for the first time since we arrived in Australia. This morning we went to a smaller gold mining museum which was also very interesting and is in the middle of town.
The museum has a large gantry in front of it and you could ride the elevator up to the first level for views of the city. The gantry is used to raise and lower people into the gold mine and also to bring up the ore. From the platform you had great views of the town.
The town of Kalgoorie on the left and you can see a larger gantry on the right and the gold mine pits behind it.
IT took about 2 hours to tour the museum including the vault room where they had lots of unprocessed gold so you could see what it looked like when it was found. They told us that all the gold samples in the vault room was worth about 5 million by today’s gold prices.
After the museum we walked the main street which is 4 blocks long and now mostly eateries, hotels and empty store fronts.
Another old hotel and some street art.
We got lunch at another bakery and took it back to our apartment to eat. After lunch we had decided to go to the movies. Downtown Abbey, the Grand Finale, started in the states today and in Australia yesterday. There happens to be a movie theatre right across from where we are staying and there was a 1:30 showing. We walked across the street and we are pretty sure that we were the only customers in the entire building. It was so nice of Merv & Michelle to rent out the entire theatre for my birthday and our own private showing of the movie.
It was an excellent movie for Downtown Abby fans and definitely wraps things up. Not saying there will not be another one but you were not left hanging and they do say this is the last.
For dinner we went to an Irish pub in one of the hotels on main street and I mixed it up some and instead of getting chicken parmesan I got chicken schnitzel which they refer to as “schnitty” chicken. Say that 3 times fast 🙂 Or slowly if you want to keep it clean…
We came back to the apartment to watch another movie on Netflix but “Kane” must have figured out he was still logged in and our access was denied. Oh well, nice while it lasted.
Tomorrow we check out and head to our last stop of the road trip. Michelle’s sister-in-law lives close to our next stop and we will have dinner with her tomorrow night. Then back to the farm on Sunday.