Marya and I spent the early part of the morning making food for the day, and then she and Greg tried to round up toys and clothing and little boys, and then the 6 of us headed for the beach.
Ocean Grove Beach is a relatively small beach a bit west of Melbourne. The drive took about 90 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Grove,_Victoria
View Larger Map
The beach was pretty, but really busy, and apparently less busy than most in the area.
Greg, Paul and I started with surfing lessons. There wasn't much to the lesson - here's the front and back of the board, here's how you get on the board, here's how you ride a wave, and here's how you stand up. However, the standing up bit...rather tricky. Paul managed to stand up for about 50 milliseconds, which is way better than I did - I never got beyond a crouch. We both went under several times and swallowed a lot of salt water. But what fun!
http://westcoast.customer.netspace.net.au/surfing.html
We spent two hour trying to catch a wave and stand up on the surf boards, and after two hours our rental/lesson time was over and we had to call it quits. So, we sat on the beach socializing with some of Greg's residency colleagues, and watching the kids play on the beach. It was really cute watching 2-year old Luke run after the older boys, and watching 4-year old Isaac content himself building an impressive sand castle.
Paul spent much of the day making sure that I was covered in adequate sunscreen. He forgot himself, though. We all got a bit of sun on the back of our hands from having them on the boards, but Paul's hands, feet and ears looked like cooked lobster. No fun at all the next day when we had to walk around the city.
We finished our day with, what else? Icecream. The kids fell asleep on the way home, and we weren't too far behind.
Were we skeptical of Paul's ability to swim before today? I didn't know!
ReplyDelete