On Sunday my love and I packed up for the long car trip to Albany. It's
not actually that long a trip (five hours drive in our little car) but
we were planning to be camping for a week and seeimg my dad as well so
just about everything went in the car. Neither of us took shoes except for
my emergency thongs. Emergency in this connotation stands for "G*d my feet
hurt and we've got four kilometres of sharp gravel left to go".
My dad has a farm just outside of Albany (Western Australia), where the air
is clean and the ground is currently not covered in goose poop. This is a
change. We went and had a look at his new renovations - a tennis court
and space for a new shed that had been levelled near our bedroom-huts.
The sand there is lovely and white, very very fine and soft. Getting
down to our hut after dark was more of a challenge, as the levelling had
created a big drop on the old road, and all the metal junk that had been
supposed to be buried in the levelling had instead been pushed to the edges,
making it a tricky proposition to navigate down the drop safely.
The next day we picked some citrus fruit from the orchard to take with
us. There had been a solid week of downpour the week before we came, and
in some places the ground was very soft. Squelchy, even. Michael (the
farm manager) had sunk down past his ankles in it the day before, so he
said. And he has tall ankles
When we got there, no-one else was there - including the residents.
Except for the youngest kids and their eleven-year-old babysitter.
Apparently it took everyone else longer than it took us to get there.
So we decided to go to a nearby beach - Muttonbird Island - and took
the kids with us. It was an entertaining experience - you have to
go down some quite steep steps to get there, under overhanging shrubs and
creepers, then when you get to the bottom there are large granite boulders
at the base of the clifffs which you have to climb over to reach the beach.
The beach itself is similar sand - fine and white and soft. The water is
shallow for a long way out, until you get to a deep channel just before
the island itself (a bird sanctuary). The kids struggled a little in their
shoes (I'd forgotten to tell them to leave them in the car) but with my
encouragement removed them immediately on reaching the sand. Those rocks
are wonderful for being barefoot - great grip, quite comfortable.
We all had a great time splashing around and digging holes in the sand,
and even almost managed to stay clean until the very end, when the one
who didn't like water suddenly threw herself into it belly first and
started eating the mud. Around about then the others started covering
eachother with more mud (we'd taken our pants off before this thankfully,
but every other item of clothing had fine itchy sand right through it!).
After an hour or so they told us we should leave (and they were right).
I stopped them from putting their shoes back on and we all scrambled
up over the rocks, even the three-year-old who was a little shy about it.
Back up the long, windy, steep path - there are always more steps going
up than down! - carrying miscellaneous shoes and bits of clothing,
swinging the one-year-old over the steps that came up to his waist and
letting him scramble the other steps. Then back into the car and back to
the sanctuary. The view from that beach is unreal - along there the
water is clean, cold and often deep, and the coastline is generally granite
cliffs. The lookout at the top is wonderful.
Written on September 22