Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

A Europa report, and a beach visit

There's been more rain during the night. A heavy shower woke me at five. From the online radar it looks like there'll be more H2O coming in from the northwest for a while yet.

The daily temperatures have dropped to the extent I've started wearing a track suit in the mornings, but I'm still bare footed. When I reach for the socks and beanie you'll know it will be really cold - like about 20 degrees C.

My number two son has just returned from a European spring holiday, taking in Holland, Ireland and Sicily. He reckons he'd never experienced such coldness, even in Sicily he managed a snowball battle near the top of Mount Etna.

Being an award winning plumber he'd noticed a few things during his travels. His impression was that standards and workmanship in all three countries are well below par with here. Furthermore, the rumours he'd heard before he left about Europe being very expensive for innocent travellers were true.

On the way back home he stopped over at Kuala Lumpur for a couple of days and enjoyed it very much. The shopping was reasonable, the food delicious and reasonably priced, and the people were friendly enough to make him want to return.

We had a welcome home barbecue lunch for him on Sunday - surf and turf:

Otherwise it's been a bit quiet this week, our eldest teenage daughter is house-sitting for a neighbour and our youngest son is away on a camp with the sea scouts. Both tended to complain about the cuisine in this house. Personally, I don't mind gruel. Now both are cooking for themselves.

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I took our youngest daughter and Milly the cocker spaniel pup to the beach. It was Milly's first sighting of the ocean and she handled it very well. She showed no inclination to stray away from us. But she's a dog who follows her nose and the nose was very busy yesterday exploring the salty smells of seaweed and a dead seagull.

The beach was between Cottesloe and Fremantle - the coastal fringe of a crumbling suburb named Mosman Park. It's a designated dog beach, and is reputed to in the vicinity of where the the Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh and his motley crew briefly came ashore in 1697.

It's not a good swimming beach. The littoral is marked by a shallow, sharp, limestone reef which extends well out into the water. However, it's okay for marine-desert snorkelling, and with luck, a few fish might be sighted. The richness of marine life in this area has significantly diminished over the past half century. There are no longer lots of empty sea shells for kids to discover on this beach.

In years past when I've been to this area, it's not had a lot of sand. The annual winter storms take it away for rinsing, and then it's returned. This time there was plenty of the stuff. For most of the time we were their the beach was totally empty in both directions and I created a panoramic picture to prove it. See it on my Panoramio site. The best way to appreciate these experimental panoramic images is to keep clicking them up to maximum size. Can you find the hang glider?

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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