Sparrow Lorelei photo gallery

Geocaching with Grandma, 10 April, 2011

We went hunting for a geocache or two down in the Altona Coastal Park. It was nice - we first went to the wrong side of the creek and discovered a little fishing shanty community built around jetties in the mangroves - and I had no idea either shanties or mangroves were even there. But then we worked out where we needed to be and it was in a completely different spot, also someplace I'd not been. So here we are walking this little stretch of the foreshore trail. This was on my due date. I was in pre-labour contractions at this point, coming at erratic intervals of anywhere between 8 and 32 minutes, and I was watching and recording the times to see if they became regular (which didn't happen for another eight hours or so). So just wandering along vaguely while the more energetic of our family do the actual searching was a nice way to spend mildly active and quietly peaceful outdoor time.

Well, sort of peaceful. About two minutes into the walk Sparrow is going to look up at the sky and realise that she can see the moon, and we will have no peace from shrieks of "Moon! Habba Ibad habba MOON!!!!" for a good fifteen minutes. This meant she didn't walk as consistently with us, and had to keep being encouraged to run to catch up ("Run run run!") instead of standing still and pointing the other way towards the moon. Or sometimes just get carried. She also tried eating some of the samphire, but wasn't too excited by it. Mmm, salty red bits.

The two caches we looked for were interesting - one was called, appropriately, Pipeline, and the other was at the site of the old racecourse stand (I didn't even know we had an old racecourse here). Some quite interesting history that's just faded into nondescriptness. We found Pipeline, didn't find the one at the racecourse stand despite much looking. Sparrow even stopped eating strawberries to help look, to no avail.