Beach, Dolphins, Ben

On Friday, as predicted, I went to Bather's Beach, about 500m from my front door. The scenery is pretty amazing and I don't just mean the dunes - Everywhere I've been in Freo, every 5 minutes the most beautiful woman I've ever seen walks by. Somehow the beach is no different :D I think I'll spend a fair amount of time here reading. It is also very peaceful.








I grabbed an incredible BBQ seafood platter (A$28) for lunch at Kaili's. The fish, (calamari, scallops, and some local whitefish) are as fresh as I've ever had. Kaili's is right on a cove chock full of pleasure boats of all sizes. I'm sitting there eating and, completely astonishing myself and everyone around, 2 dolphins come swimming through playing with each other! Unreal! Very hard to capture on camera but here's the best pic I got. (BTW - you can click on all of these to view the full sized picture.














It's close to100 degrees. On my walk up to the golf course, I stopped for an ice cream which I ate at the Fremantle Oval




Next to the Oval is the Fremantle Prison - get this, the plaque outside the prison, now a museum, says that the bridge over Fairbairn St was built to connect the Prison to the community! I gotta go back and see if that was done before or after it became a landmark.

Then I walked up to the Fremantle Municapal Golf Course to inquire about hiring clubs and a tee time. The course is run by some truly wonderful folks, Nola and Andy, who invited me to hit up their league at 8am the next morning. The introduced me to a lad named Ben from Geelong, newly from Perth, and we hit it off famously.





Ben has only been golfing for 3 years but he's a 9 handicap. Pretty astounding (the following comment is meant as an excuse for me and not as a discredit to Ben, but one can golf in Australia year round, not for a 5 month period and only when it's not raining like New England!) See, Ben was a junior archery champion who dropped the sport in disgust with the politics. He has since brought, I assume, the same focus, intensity, and enthusiasm that got him his archery skills to golf to get to where he is. He let me use his clubs and we hit a couple buckets. He's a great bloke and I'm now sold on the league after going 3 for 3 with the folks I met at the course. I'll be back tomorrow.






On my way back, I stopped at the Fremantle War Memorial which, staggeringly enough, has a torpedo commemorating the US Submarines that were stationed in Freo during WWII! The memorial is on top of a hill with a spectacular 270 degree view of the Indian Ocean. I took a series of panorama pics but never loaded the Canon software that stitches those together onto this POS laptop. I'll have to post that later when I get the software.

All for now. Well, it's not, but I don't want to exhaust you in this posting!