so last weekend Alexander joined me and my dad on one of our semiregular coastal hikes

[bliumchik]

I may not have mentioned here, but dad and I are going to Nepal in the summer, and because my dad is Macguyver, he is insisting on stringent preparations involving several kilos of waterbottles in a backpack and infinite stairs.

Al didn’t have to carry a bag though, because he was just company, not training. Anyway, the walk is mostly stairs and boardwalks and a couple of regular-street detours around blocks of posh dicks who wouldn’t sign off on the walkway going in front of their properties, but there’s one section where you have to pick across Lurline Bay, which is basically just a section of the Sydney coast where enough bits have fallen off the cliffs that there’s a crescent of rock shelf and large stones where you can walk right next to the ocean. People fish there. It looks like this.

 

This morning we switched over to daylight savings time, thus bumping the usually gradually-changing tides a whole hour back. It looked like this.

That’s a view from the far side. When we came down the cliff path on the other side it looked kinda navigable. By the time we got halfway across we were having to wade through puddles. Then this happened.

My dad and I, by virtue of standing on the large rock from which we took this picture, escaped that particular deluge. At this point Alexander decided that he wasn’t getting any damper and just struck out for the staircase through ankle-deep water, but my dad and I still thought we might be able to find a dry-ish path. We tried climbing up on a dry rock shelf, but it ended just short of where we needed to go and was too steep to climb down from on that end. As we stood on that shelf trying to analyse the tide’s patterns to figure out when to make a run for it, my dad made a terrible mistake.

“At least this shelf is dry,” he said. “Obviously the waves don’t go this high.

Well, after such a blatant invocation of Murphy’s Law, we were immediately slapped in the knees by a wall of white water.

“First time for everything,” I muttered, squelchily.

Eventually we made a run for it and I got away without further sogginess, although I still had to stop at the top of the stairs and wring out my socks. Alexander elected to drip-dry, on account of it being a hot day and him being wet from head to toe (although he’d managed to hold his phone and ipod up out of the way).

About an hour later, my dad remembered the towel he’d put in my backpack.


also we saw this sweet bird