Kangaroo Exile: Cottesloe Beach Strikes Back

Vinny wanted to head back to Cottesloe Beach, so we decided that we would head out on Saturday. It was a beautiful day. Spring has moved into summer here, but the temperature isn't too high yet. The sun, however, is brutal, and if you're out in the sun, it really can drag you down quickly. We had heard from several people that the best times to go to the beach were in the morning and in the evening, so we decided to get up, have breakfast, and head over to the beach early.

We dressed for the beach, but since we have no car still, we wore our beach clothes on the bus. Vinny asked worriedly, "what will people think of us on the bus?" My response was simple. "I think they'll be jealous because they want to go to the beach too." He liked that answer. So we sat on the bus in our swim trunks and Tshirts and made our way to the Esplanade bus/train station.

At esplanade we jumped onto the train to the Perth Underground, then switched trains to head out to Cottesloe. On the Freemantle line was a young couple, I'm assuming on their honeymoon, who sat near us. The woman sat next to Vinny; she was very graceful and beautiful, and every time she turned to Vinny and smiled he'd turn away and bury his face in my side as hard as he could. They told me they were from Taiwan and were going to Cottesloe, but didn't know exactly how to get there. I'm assuming she knew we were the two to ask. No one else was sitting around in swim trunks.

We talked a bit about Perth, about Cottesloe, and then decided that I'd show them how to get there. The young woman kept wanting to get vinny's picture. She was really impressed with his eyelashes and kept telling him how cute he was, and he turned every shade of red known to humanity. I told the young man he needed to watch out as Vinny is well-known to be a charmer of the ladies. He laughed and agreed.

Vinny let her get her picture and we made our way to the beach. We told them how to get to the beach and made our separate ways.

The day was beautiful. We started off getting ourselves nice and covered with sunscreen. I had messed up last year in getting vinny covered and he got a bad burn on his back (you could even see my handprints in the burn, even) and I was determined to not let that happen again. He's very white by nature, but after all of the sunscreen, he was nearly a ghost.

The beach wasn't deserted, yet it wasn't crowded either. People were playing beach volleyball, surfing, boating, sunbathing, swimming, picnicking, you name it. We made our way close to the waterline and I put down the blankets.

Vinny immediately wanted to get into the waves, so we walked into the water. On the toes it was chilly, but as the waves would crash in, if you allowed yourself to just walk out a bit, the waves were warm. It took Vinny a while to get used to the waves. The water would come seeping up and he'd scream and run back. To try to make it easier we sat down right on the edge and let the water run past us, but as the tide was coming in, it wasn't long before small waves were rushing and slapping us in the chest.


Vinny thought a picture of his feet buried would be superb.

Looking out over the water

Vinny wanted to take a break from the water and went back into the sand. He wanted me to bury him in the sand with only his head poking out. I told him that he might find that a little bit scary because when you do that, because of the weight of the sand, you can't move, and have to be dug out. He said it'd be ok and to go ahead. So I dug. And dug. And dug. Eventually there was a hole deep enough for him to sit within and have his shoulders above the sand. He sat in the hole and I got the "before" picture. I'm glad I got that one because once I started filling him in and got the sand up to his arms he wanted out.

There was a family with two little boys, maybe three and four years old, who sat next to us. The boy asked Vinny to play with him and Vinny agreed. He let Vinny borrow some buckets and they went about building a sandcastle.

They'd run up to the water, grab some water in the bucket, then run back. Again the tide was coming in, and you can't tell from the pictures, but some of these swells are absolutely huge. People say Cottesloe is good for surfing and getting knocked around and bruised, and it's true. I went out into the swells a bit to help with the getting of water and to stand there if one of the boys got washed away. I'm glad I did that, because one of the boys, the younger of the two who wasn't playing with Vinny, was not ten feet in front of his mother and a larger, unexpected swell came in and hit him. He fell into the water and was pulled back into the water, but I grabbed onto him when he was sucked past me. He made it out of the water and his father, in the best Australian chipper attitude looked at him, smiling, and said, "wow those are some big waves, aren't they?"

That is one thing I like about it here. It does seem like everyone helps watch out for everyone else, at least in our part. And the boy wasn't yelled at. He didn't learn to fear the surf, only to respect it, and I'm sure that when he goes in again he'll be thinking "i need to watch the waves" instead of "i'm staying out of those waves." It reminds me a lot of the line from Batman Begins: "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

Vinny and I got back into the water and played around for quite some time. We got hungry around lunch time and packed ourselves up and made our way up the drag to find a place where we'd both enjoy what we ate.

Eventually we found a cafe where they served both pancakes and hamburgers -as well as tons of other things, including guava and passion-fruit smoothies, which are very good.

Pancakes as big as your head!

Vinny got a stack of pancakes covered in maple and cream, and I got some sort of hamburger. It wasn't the Aussie, but it was big nonetheless, and it was served with potatoes. We both got milkshakes. I need to point out that milkshakes here aren't ice cream you drink through a straw. It's more like whipped, chilled milk of various flavors.

The food was so good that I told Vinny we had to bring Mama there sometime and he told me that no, we needed to keep this a secret from Mama, because this was a secret place for we men to go. I told him ok, we could do that, but he might want to change his mind because those pancakes were quite good.

Yuuum.

After lunch we went along the shoreline to a playground and spent a few hours there. During the time at the playground, lots of cars drove past, lots of scantily-clad women were everywhere and there was this one apartment balcony right across the street and two stories up where four young guys had gathered.

They were the types that wanted attention. When the prettier ladies would walk past, they'd turn up their music, hoot and holler to the "girls," and even sometimes run downstairs and cross the street and introduce themselves, trying to get one or two to go back up to the apartment with them.

There was one woman who was incredibly beautiful, standing on the sidewalk, waiting. They were hooting down to her and she ignored them. Then one came running down to her and put on his best charm, showing his chest, six-pack, and extended his peacock feathers and she didn't seem very impressed at all.

In a simple twist of fate, a young man, very lanky, very white, very geeky, pulled up on a moped. She threw her arms around him and got on the back of the moped, and they sped away. The look on the bonehead's face as they left him behind screamed "wtf?" All I could think of doing was shouting, as loudly as I could,

"NERD POWER!"

But I didn't. I wasn't in the mood to get my butt kicked just to prove a point.

They kept on and on and fortunately by the time we left, no one had been foolish enough to go back up to his apartment. I'm sure that might have ended quite badly.

We decided to take the bus back. We saw that the bus would actually run us back to the Esplanade station. We hopped on the bus and for my first time at least got a tour of the western side of Perth's estuary. Vinny, on the other hand, as tired as he was, fell asleep.

He told me later that he really enjoyed the outing.

It was a great day.

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