It was Paul’s say off and he’d been badgering me to go to the beach for some time. “Oooh KAY!” I conceded and we packed our bags and headed off.
It wasn’t quite so straightforward as that: Paul had no swimwear so we had to go shopping first, which is never a trivial thing. With the best intentions, we ended spending hours pottering around town looking for the right pair of swimmers for under a hundred bucks. David Jones, the Universal Store, General Pants, Myer, G-Star, the list continued until finally we found the porridge that was just right and caught a train to my parents place to steal the car.
After pulling on to the highway I instructed Paul to find a CD to put on. I’d burned some classic hits for a previous car trip but they’d never seen the light of day until now, so with the greatest of anticipation we were both disappointed to find they weren’t really very good choices for car trip music at all. We got through a little bit of The Dandy Warhols and a few tracks of The Postal Service before we gave up and warmed up for our beach antics with some FM channel surfing.
I hadn’t been to Caloundra for near on a decade; it’s a little country town that hasn’t grown up a bit, and it’s really not a nice place to get lost in. Despite there being ample (or not so ample enough) signage, I still managed to take two wrong turns before we got to the beach. I pulled up in a car park, got out and forgot to lock the car doors as we headed off.
The beach itself was great. We went to Kings Beach because it was the one with the biggest sign, and neither of us knew where else to go. It was packed for a Tuesday because as Paul mentioned, it was still school holidays. I noted back that we also arrived after school hours anyway, and Paul rebutted that shut up, it’s not just my fault we’re late.
I lathered my white, sweaty body up with sunscreen, though judging by the amount of sunlight my particular moontan was reflecting, I’m not sure if it was entirely necessary. Paul took off his sunglasses and was dazzled briefly by my white glowing brilliance. Paul sat down, I fidgeted for a while, and eventually we decided to go in the water.
The first thing you would have noticed if you’d had been there is that there were about six hundred kids everywhere you looked. It was like gremlins in a bathtub, they were popping up everywhere. The second thing you would have noticed is that I forgot to take of my glasses. Paul certainly noticed this, and told me I should take them off. I agreed, caught a wave back to the shore, and never saw them again.
We swam twice, and “sun-baked” twice. I opted for more of a shade-bake and made half blind sandcastles, while Paul tried his best to burn himself all the while searching for hot, age appropriate boys. I was pretty annoyed I didn’t have any perve capabilities for the rest of the day, although I did spot a nice brownish area with points.
We left as the sun was starting to go down, and went walking along the shore in search of food. Hot dogs, ot be exact, although it seems that such delicacies are in short supply so far north. Every single restaurant served fish, every hamburger store served fish hamburgers, and every Thai restaurant was disappointingly Asian. It was a hot dog disaster, so much so that Paul’s blood sugar dropped too far into the red and he started being really cranky.
We ended up opting for emergency hamburgers and waiting until twilight had turned to darkness so I could drive home — twilight is the one time of day I have the most trouble seeing with or without my glasses; there’s enough light to be distracting, but not enough I can actually make out what anything is.
Eventually we got home safe and sound, obeying the speed limit, and listening to Rosie Beaton on Super Request. It was a good day, I give it four and a half stars.
