I feel like times go
by where there’s not really much to blog about, and then everything happens at
once. This then puts me behind, one
because I have like three things to write about at once, and two because I’m a
slacker, so I don’t write about things as they come up.
So with that, let’s
catch up on last week. Beef visited for
a grand total of six days. She arrived
Sunday mid-day and left the following Saturday mid-day. I had intended to take only three days off
work to run around with her and Ruthie, but I quickly realized I was going to
need the whole week to keep up with them.
[Which was fine by me, for the record.]
I had intended to do something similar to my Sydney
trip with Lorraine
and Ruthie and write a bit about what happened each day, but I was so wiped by
the end of each day, all I did was come home and go to bed most times.
Sunday while Ruthie
was picking up Beef at the airport, I was online with Greg and Squirrel playing
games. Ruthie took Beef around a bit to
get a small bite at the Vic Market, and then they came home to nap. Sunday night I had purchased us tickets for a
roof top showing of Beetlejuice. Dinner
was in an Indian fusion tapas style restaurant the floor below the cinema, and
the movie was enjoyed on a nice cool partly cloudy night with a pitcher of
sangria.
Monday found us up at
a fairly decent hour of the morning to hit the road and drive out along the Great Ocean Road to
the Twelve Apostles. Shortly after
Ruthie and I got settled in, we took a day and drove part of the GOR, but not
the whole thing. Ruthie and Lorraine made the trip
to the Twelve Apostles on another day, but this was my first time.
Let me interrupt here
for a moment and point out that on the first couple days of January, we were
experiencing the kind of summer I had expected while being in Australia. As I mentioned in a blog post or two ago, the
high had gotten to 104 one day. But now
that it’s the 2nd week in Jan we were experiencing record lows –
like highs of 65 for nearly the mid-point of summer. Not to mention the clouds [one day had a
total exposure of 3 hours] and rain [from rain to sun to rain to sun to rain to
sun within an hour on the GOR, for example].
At least Beef got to experience true Melbourne weather. Certainly not ideal since she likes to sit on
the beach, but we still made the best out of it.
Right, so we make it
out to the Twelve Apostles where the winds are so fierce and gusty you can
barely hold your hands still long enough to get a good picture. We fight through the tourists for a couple
snaps before we head down to the beach.
With my little gorilla pod, we tried to get a few jumping pictures in
front of one of “the apostles” aka rocks, but Ruthie and I totally failed on
the timing every time.
I say “fight through
the tourists” but really it was more of fight to not get pushed out of the
way. Two stories for this one. Back in Apollo Bay
at the memorial arch, we happened upon two bus loads of horribly mustached
middle aged Indian men. I was still at
the car getting the Go Pro camera mounted to the car while Ruthie and Beef went
up to the arch to get a picture. While
they were getting situated, one of them very rudely told them to get out of the
way of his picture. I didn’t see this
one happen, but we mocked them regardless.
Then while at the
Twelve Apostles, Ruthie was calmly enjoying the view leaning over the hand
rail, with a couple tourists on her right and none on her left. This time I happened to be standing right
there and witnessed the whole thing. The
Asian tourist with her dSLR shoved her way in between Ruthie and the tourists
on her right by means of putting her arms up and over Ruthie’s right
shoulder. Meanwhile the entire left side
of Ruthie was wide open for someone to stand and posture for pictures. Seriously rude people.
Anyways, we returned
from the GOR to get some Thai food from our local favourite and watched some
Top Gear in our flat. Then off to bed
and up early for a trip back down to Torquay for our second ever first surfing
lesson. I feel like it’s safe to say
that short of serious injury or death it might have been the worst time I’ve
ever had in the ocean. Something
happened with the salt water and the sunscreen I was wearing and shortly after
being in the ocean, I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes
open for any length of time. Even before
that, while I’m a fan of short, concise instructions, our instructor gave us
that and not much more. A quick demo on
how to get up on the board, and then we were off into the ocean. [Oh, and it was raining a bit, but not that
it mattered since we were in the ocean with wet suits – and the wet suits made
a huge difference fighting what would be a brutal wind chill.]
Our first first surf
lesson was in Maui, where the waves were
crystal blue, and consistently the same size and direction and speed throughout
the entire lesson. This time was nothing
like that. Proper waves [while not
really big, mind you] with white water and I felt like there was a big
difference in energy depletion due to the fact that we had to walk our boards
out through the waves as opposed to ride/swim our boards out to where we’d
catch them in Maui. So after an hour and
a half [out of two, total] I was pretty much done. Ruthie was not too far behind me in throwing
in the towel. Meanwhile, Beef had
managed to hop up and start surfing. The
upside to the whole thing was that there were only a few of us out there
surfing, so it wasn’t really that crowded.
Plus, the conditions were right that if you could get up on the board,
you could actually catch quite a few waves – which Beef seemed to do.
After that beating, we
enjoyed some good food in Torquay and the made our way back to Melbourne.
Once we’d regrouped a bit from the morning’s activities and the drive
back, we got ready to meet up with Ruthie’s local friends J&J for dinner –
first time having Italian food since we’ve been here.
-EP
No comments:
Post a Comment