Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Visiting the Mornington Peninsula with Grandma, 10-11 April, 2010

Beachfront on the bay at Sorrento. Mum, Sparrow and I left James having a quiet lie-in and drove off to the Mornington Peninsula. Sparrow slept until just a few minutes before we reached Sorrento, which was a pretty good distance. And then it was time to stop driving, have some food and get some wriggle and play time. Though it was a little cool. So we stopped at the park by where the Queenscliff ferry comes in.

Finding interesting things on the grass to chew on. Mainly silver banksia flowers and Norfolk Island Pine "leaves". I love this one-suspender look, seems to fit with the "chaw" thing.

Do you want some too?

Looking up the east side of the bay as the clouds tumble up through the sky and the resting sailboats rock sail-lessly and restlessly. I think that's Arthurs Seat behind, and Frankston high ground to the left.

Ferry's coming in, and one little girl is getting wriggly and heavy. Let's find a bench.

Ah, that's better. Something to stand on for the small person, something to sit on for the big person. There was something about the composition of this that I really liked.

Food for the small person. Morning tea must happen regularly, and rockmelon (or Kantalupe) is a definite favourite. Selecting a piece, picking it up, bringing it to one's mouth and taking a bite of it involves serious consideration. Mum and I were thinking about food too, so after this we wandered up the hill into the "town" part of Sorrento. It seems like that stretch of the Peninsula bayside is constant built area, with the original towns blending almost seamlessly into each other in a string of beautiful expensive sea-change and holiday houses.

The town centre of Sorrento is very pretty, but somehow a bit bland and samey, with the kind of character that seems to lack character (if that makes any sense). It's been a town that people go to visit for a little too long. I saw it with different eyes than Mum, because (as you can see here) it's all limestone buildings. That's nothing to a Perth person, but to a Melbournian who's constantly surrounded by deep and shadowy bluestone the lightness of limestone seems unusually airy and bright. It gives a subconscious restful and "this is different" feeling to the town. We got lunch at the bakery and looked for a place to sit down - and this town appears to lack benches. We thought there was a bench in this arcade, but it turned out to be just a flowerbed. So then we had to try and keep Sparrow from heading off exploring while we ate. She is so active now, it's lovely. And she likes cauliflower pie.

On the way back down the hill we found this little park area. If only we'd known... :-) It was a good place to sit and read through some of the tourist information we'd picked up. And a good place to play with Sparrow. This is the first time she's really got to crawl on a sloping hill - where we live it's so amazingly flat thanks to the volcanoes a couple of million years ago, even a five-metre rise is considered "geologically significant" (or "unusual views" if you are a land estate developer). So rolling down a hill was a new thing. She and I played that game a bit, but were somewhat hindered by her not being too willing to crawl back up the slope at all. She is often hesitant to crawl around in new places until she gets comfortable with it all, and will choose to sit still and look at something in preference to heading off. Unless that's what we're relying on her doing, of course, in which case she's out of there at the first opportunity.

London Bridge, and a stop on the Sorrento-Portsea Artists Trail. There are a few of these artists trails around Melbourne, and it's always fun to see the images painted however long ago next to the place that was painted. We drove out to Point Nepean park and considered going for an explore, but it just didn't seem like the best thing to do with a small baby. So we went back through Portsea and looked at other interesting things. I realised standing here just how much I miss the ocean sometimes. Port Phillip Bay is really a bit closed in, it doesn't have the same feel or smell or colours in the water. Sparrow seemed to be vaguely aware of a difference too, she was looking around a lot.

The boardwalk at Cape Schanck. We stopped in thinking we might get a cup of tea and go for a walk, but it wasn't quite the right setup for that. Cups of tea seemed a bit hard to come by on this trip. We did go for a walk, though, along the loop path, and saw that you could take the boardwalk all the way down to the beach here. We decided that that was a lot of stairs and a long lot of downwards that would then involve coming all the way back up again, so just enjoyed the view (and more rockmelon and grapes).

And here we are just a little outside the township of Flinders, enjoying an unexpected stop. I came up the hill and felt the engine lose power and realised we were about half a minute away from running out of petrol. So I stopped right there and then. James' car doesn't have a petrol warning light, it just assumes that you'll take its petrol gauge seriously. But the gauge just isn't where I look on the console, so I often come close to running out before I happen to glance at it. So then we had a bit more of an adventure. James never has RACV membership because he figures he doesn't need it, and I hadn't yet convinced him that *I* need it. My car has RACV roadside assistance, but I wasn't driving my car - and it turned out my RACV membership had expired two days before anyway. It was going to be cheaper to ring a taxi than to pay for them to come out and bring us petrol. I got the RACV phone guy to tell us where the nearest petrol station was (having not seen one for some time) and he said it was just down in Flinders town. So I thought well, I could just walk down there. Sparrow seemed happy enough with Mum here, they are having a nice time by the side of the road in this photo and seemed quite happy to sit and play with toys and books and have some food and look at flowers and weeds and stuff.

I got offered a lift almost immediately, by a lovely couple who've lived in the area for a long time, and they very nicely took me down to where the petrol station was supposed to be. It wasn't there, hadn't been there for some years (as they suspected), so they took me on to the next nearest which was twenty minutes drive away. I got the petrol, they brought me back and helped us get it in the car. They were so lovely, gave up a fishing expedition to help us out. I did wish though that I'd sent Mum off to get the petrol, because they were full of stories about the area and the sun came out while we drove and it was all very pretty. And I spent the trip feeling nervous about Sparrow and trying not to panic about having left her behind and not being able to be very chatty, where Mum would have quite enjoyed the touristy aspect of it. By the time it came to us driving up to the petrol station to finish filling up, it was not nearly so nice out and we were tired and thirsty and needing toilets. It's a pity that was the only petrol station, as they don't have public toilets and laughed at Mum when she asked. Not the right way to treat older ladies needing a loo generally, and particularly annoying given what we'd been through that afternoon. Thankfully Sparrow didn't seem bothered by any of it and barely even noticed that I'd been gone, so that was one less problem.

However, we survived - barely. And we got to Elsa's! We made it up to Frankston, found James at the train station after his football game, and got all of us tired and low-blood-sugar people over to Elsa's despite my having misremembered the address and the directions and her surname and her phone number. (It was that kind of day, really.) So we had California-themed tacos, with lots of cheerfulness and plenty of cups of tea.

Sparrow still thinks Elsa is fantastic. (She is, too. Seeing her made the day that much brighter.)