Day 201- Victor Harbor

Cold and blustery rainy day today. Rugged up in some warm clothes and headed off into town. First stop to buy more cold and flu medicine! LOL! Then we had lunch at a cafe in town. Had a quick look through the Whale Centre where the kids had a ball in the "bone house" and doing some fishy jigsaw puzzles and looking at sea creatures through the microscope. Then it was time to go see the penguins.
We took the horse drawn tram across the causeway for the 1.3km trip to Granite Island. There are eight horses in total that work a three hour shift for four days of the week. In their time off they gallop around 100acres of farmland just in from the coast or enjoy a morning swim in the ocean. Must be nice for them! :)
The Penguin Centre on the island is like a little rehabilitation and research centre. The volunteer staff were super nice and really generous with their time and stories and we watched them being fed and heard all about how each of the penguins came to be at the centre. Then we saw some "baby" penguins. They were 9 weeks old and were almost as big as a full-grown penguin they just still had a heap of that fluffy fur around their necks instead of proper penguin-skin. Aparently they are born the same size as a chicken chick but between 3weeks and 9weeks they just shoot up in size until they are ready to fend for themselves at 10weeks, so these fellas were about ready to be kicked out of home. They were wild pengiuns and not part of the centre but their mum and dad chose to nest in one of the nesting boxes attached to the centre so we got to peek at them!
Had a bit of a fight to get the boys out of the penguin centre. Jordy wanted to read the books and Darcy wanted to draw. Fair enough too, i guess, but we wanted to have a quick look around and there was only one more horse tram back to the mainland that evening and we did not want to miss it!
Darcy adopted a randon grandmother on the tram on the way back and held her hand and sat next to her and pointed at all the birds and rocks.