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.