One of my housemates has a family beach house at Point Leo, which is south of Melbourne on Mornington Peninsula. The beach had almost everything I love about beaches: shells, sand and not too cold of water. There were sections of the beach that were littered with tiny shells of all different colors. Some of them were quite glorious green, others pearl, red and brown.The sand was perfect for sculpting. Over the course of four days, I made two castles and a sand octopus.
There was was a storm on the first night. I sat on the deck of the house wrapped in a blanket and holding a cup of tea, watching the lightning and listening to the rain fall.
In the morning, I woke up early to make breakfast for everyone. Several of us went to the beach in the afternoon for some body boarding and swimming. It wasn't too warm out and the water was cold--a combination that made me not stay long. The next day, however, was warmer and resulted in a much more pleasant swim.
The second morning I woke early to take a walk and see the tide pools. They were unimpressive. No starfish, no urchins or anemones, nothing different from the daytime beach other than a few types of sponges and seaweed I hadn't seen before. So after tide pool wading I continued the walk through a small marsh and spotted a few herons.
My evenings were spent gazing at the sky. In anticipation of the trip, I had printed out a southern hemisphere star chart with all the constellations. Coloring it also gave me something to do on the car ride down.
Because it rained the first night, the ground felt like a wet sponge. The second I stepped foot in the yard water gushed out around my shoe. There was an open field across the road and maybe a hundred meters over. It was away from the light in the house and ideal for stargazing. But the father I got, the harder it became to see because (stupid me) forgot a flashlight. Instead, I was equipped with a blanket and a cup of peppermint tea. After I staked out a good spot, I folded the blanket into quarters and laid it on the s
pongey grass. The thickness worked well enough to withhold the water, so I curled up on top of the blanket and tried to identify the constellations with the star chart by the dim light of my cell phone.There were also plenty of games played, my favourite of which was probably Cities and Knights because we were in a hexagonally shaped house.
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