Sand surfing and cheering the Dockers

Day one of the holiday: We left Perth at 9:20 and drove up the coastal road, first stop at Lancelin at 11:00. We rented boards from a gas station and headed over to the dunes to try ‘sandboarding’, which is like snowboarding but on sand. It’s tougher than snowboarding, because your feet aren’t strapped in and you have to walk back up once you have gone down the dune. 

You can control your speed to a certain extent by choosing to wax the board for speed or let it get sandy to slow down. But you can’t do a lot of other control! Our main challenge was making sure the board didn’t go over rocks, because we had been warned of losing our $50 deposit on the boards. Sol and Chris took to it quite quickly; Rio and I were a little more cautious, but we all had fun in the end. 

I liked it best as a toboggan, sitting down and sliding in the sand. I used my feet for control – the only down side of that being that I would send sand flying up my shorts. Having covered ourselves in sunscreen in advance, we all walked out of the dunes with a layer of sand stuck onto us.

After that, we went to the Endeavour Tavern to watch Perth’s local footy team, Fremantle Dockers, playing in the Grand Final against the Tasmanian team, Hawthorn Hawkes. The tavern was enormous and absolutely heaving with people, but it had a nice outdoor space and was able to cope with the large crowd reasonably well. 

The game was exciting, but the Dockers went behind from the beginning and spent the entire game trying to catch up. Each time we scored, the Hawkes came back. It was pretty close compared with some of the matches we’ve seen in the lead up to the final, but it wasn’t quite the Dockers’ magic moment everyone on the west coast had been hoping for. It was the Dockers’ first time making it to the grand final, and Perth has been decked out in purple and white with anchors for the last couple of weeks in the build up. The kids played footy on the beach with their Dockers’ ball in between the quarters, but were very disappointed with the end result.

Sol said it was even more exciting than watching the Canucks playing!

After lunch, another long drive, with a brief stop in Dongara for groceries and a leg stretch. The scenery has gone through several transitions, from Perth’s forested slopes to a more windswept, scrubby dune landscape, to green pastures and farmland near Geraldton where we are spending the night. We are staying in a very comfortable little cottage on a farm south of Geraldton; wishing we could stay longer, actually, given how charming it is.

(That's a picture of the main house, not the cottage we stayed in next door). And apparently there are pet kangaroos here, though we arrived fairly late so didn’t have a chance to meet them. The geese have left their signs around, and the mozzies chased the boys inside, but the excitement of the evening was spotting a little lizard on the wall. (Chris didn’t mention the spider he found when pulling out the sofa bed). We played a cutthroat game of Magic after supper, and I won for the first time in a multi-player situation, which was quite momentous for me. 

Sheep farming in the country

This weekend we got the opportunity to experience an Australian sheep farm. Granted, with 300 sheep it is considered a 'hobby farm' rather than a commercial farm. My colleague Ray Marchetti is an auditor by day and a farmer on the weekends, getting back to his Italian farming roots. We had to venture farther out of Perth than we have been so far, a good 2 hour drive at our speed (Ray expected an hour - shows you how Australians drive. The speed limits here are much higher than in Canada. We were on a two lane country road and the speed limit was 110 km - compare that with the Pat Bay Highway from Victoria to Sidney, a four lane divided highway, where the speed limit occasionally reaches 90 km).

Ray has 300 acres, with rolling hills, a creek, sheep paddocks, a big tractor and multiple small farm vehicles. The youngest of his five children, Noah, was at the farm with his cousin James on Sunday when we visited. Noah had the job of identifying which sheep needed their bottom wool shearing to clean them up before being sent to market, while James was in charge of rustling up the sheep Noah identified. It was a pretty physical job, as the sheep aren't particularly keen and they charge around in big herds whenever a person comes near them. Ray had the battery-powered clipping shears and was in charge of that end of the job, flipping over the sheep with the most matted wool to get right along the underbelly.

We had the opportunity to discover just how physical it is to handle sheep, as each of us was handed a baby lamb to cuddle when we arrived. As you can see, I'm struggling a little to hang on. Poor Sol got a good hoof in the chest as well.

Ray gave us a tour of his 300 acres in a big four wheel drive truck, which nonetheless managed to get stuck in the mud near the creek. Luckily, he was able to pull it out with the tractor. Meanwhile, we did some exploring and the kids found themselves walking through some spiky grass - it makes sense now why grass grows in 'blades'!

The highlight of the trip for the kids, though, was undoubtedly the opportunity to drive the ATV and motorbike, which they each got to try. Apart from Rio not being quite sure how to brake, they took to wheels and motors surprisingly well. For Sol, his dirt biking experience at Western Speedway had prepared him, but it was Rio's first driving apart from go karts.

But for me, the highlight was the sweet little lambs, baaing away in the fields. Even with their scraggly bottoms, they're pretty cute.

Maritime Day and beyond

This Saturday we went back to Fremantle for our tourist activity of the weekend, as we hadn't properly explored the town or its museums. We started off with some squash at the Hilton club, the boys against each other (Rooney vs Rooney) and me against Cara Allan, a woman I was matched up with by the club owner.

We all had a good run, while Chris did the grocery shopping, and then we went to try out "Fremantle's best Indian restaurant", called Maya. Since it's the only Indian restaurant we have tried, in Fremantle or Perth, we couldn't scientifically test the guidebook's review, but it was certainly very good. Rio tried the lamb rogan josh, which was a little bit spicy for his taste but he enjoyed the meatiness of it. Sol had butter chicken, despite noticing that it had "little cream" listed as an ingredient, and also enjoyed that. Chris and I shared a palak paneer dish which was bright green and very tasty, as well as an eggplant/capsicum curry.

We wandered a bit in the trendy shopping district of Fremantle, and the boys had a good browse in a souvenir shop while I found a great bulk health food store and stocked up on some of the weird and wonderful ingredients that I have been missing.

After that we headed over to the docks and discovered that we had timed our visit magnificently to coincide with Maritime Day. There was a lot going on in various parts of the docks, but we wanted to visit the Maritime Museum so that was our focus for the afternoon. We explored the boat displays from down the ages, hanging at all levels in the sailboat-shaped museum. Then we did a special tour of the submarine - it's claustrophobic enough that they only take 10 people in at a time, and the tour is very in-depth and informative, taking a full hour to get in and around it.

My level of maturity was revealed when I discovered that my favourite part of the tour was learning the Stop Snorting Routine - though I have to say that it is surprisingly difficult to stop snorting when you are instructed to do so.

Sunday was Father's Day, which gave us a chance to make up to Chris the underwhelming father's day he had back in June when we were in Skagit. Although we did start the day in a similar way, with the morning spent watching two soccer matches. We had Rio's penultimate soccer match and Sol's final match. Rio played at home and Sol was away at Gosnells. Rio had to take his turn in goal for the first half of the match, and was kept quite busy with shots because the other team liked to leave one or two people lurking near goal while our defenders liked to play up in the attacking zone. He also used his hands outside the crease (it's a very small crease area) so he had to defend against a blistering free kick from very close range. His reactions were sharp, though, so they ended the half 0-0. In the second half, the other team got 3 cheap goals from poor goal kicks by the inexperienced goalie, but Rio had some satisfaction of scoring from a centrekick with a surprising run down the middle, a shot that hit the post and then a goal on the follow up.

Unfortunately for Sol, Rio's game made him late for his own match warm up, and by the time he turned up, they had a full roster of 15 players (they are not allowed to field more than 14 for any match and they aren't organised enough to figure it out in advance). So, he had to just watch and cheer for his final game of the season. Disappointing, but good that he had enough team spirit to stay under those circumstances. Now that his practices are done, he has decided to keep his skills and fitness up by getting up early to go for runs, and by training on his own in the yard or at the park nearby.

My father's day treat to Chris was to take him for 9 holes of golf at our nearby Wembley golf course, while the boys went to their first CISV Perth event. The CISV event was pretty small and mellow, but it was good for Rio to get the opportunity to try it out - and because it meant that Chris and I could go golfing on our own. Not that we wouldn't have wanted to have the kids golf with us, but the course had a lot of very long holes and it would have taken us a lot longer with all four of us - as it was, we were quite slow and let the people behind us jump in front after a few holes of feeling embarrassed by our slow progress. The course was really nice, with wide fairways divided by forests full of all of the cool Ozzie birds, including some noisy kookaburras. There isn't much undergrowth, so we managed to do the whole course without losing any balls, and in fact we gained two when hunting for our own balls in the forest. I think this means that we have to golf at least once more while we're here, perhaps on a course with lots of water features, so that we can use up the balls and not have to bring them home with us. (Luggage weight for the return journey is already a big consideration in all of our decisions about what to buy and what to do without).

After golfing, Chris went out for some cricket with the boys while I made his favourite (gourmet) mac n'cheese for supper and a mocha cake. It was warm enough to eat outside on the patio, though a little funny to be eating in the dark but warm air. The boys have both suffered some bug bites on their ankles, which have swelled up to give Sol a Cankle.

The final excitement to share this week has been the school sports carnivals. These are the opportunity for the four school "houses" to compete against each other for house points, as in Harry Potter. At Rio's school, the kids had sprayed their hair in their house colours and brought in decorated stuffed animals and other accoutrements. There was a very large parent paparrazi, well served by a cappucino van and a bake stand run by the parents' association. It was the warmest day of the week so far, so the kids were throwing off their shoes and donning their hats and sunscreen. In fact, most of them chose to participate in their sports events with bare feet, something which surprised me but Rio adapted to it happily.

Sol's school is so big that they divided the carnival up by year and the competitions didn't actually involve racing or competing against entrants from the other houses. Each house went to a station and did the activity, and then the results were recorded and compared to determine the winner later. Sol's house, Floreat, happened to win this time, though he didn't feel that he contributed much to that result as track and field isn't his forte.