Sunshine, Sandcastles and Stingrays

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Day 363 (24.03.08)

We thought we’d make the most of today as we both woke feeling refreshed after our exceedingly lazy few days. To continue the aim of exploring Melbourne’s surrounds whilst we still had Nora, today’s choice of destination was the Mornington Peninsula, just down the coast from the city. The weather was bright and sunny and we decided to hop into the van and see where the day took us.

As we passed through a town called Frankston from the corner of our eyes we spotted what looked like the largest sandcastles in the world. We couldn’t resist a closer look and parked up to find a sandcastle exhibition where huge quantities of sand had been shaped into scenes from various fairytales and stories. These were just amazing and as we marvelled at the skills of the sculptors we had great fun (with all the other children there!) guessing which story each was depicting.

Continuing our journey down the coast we made our next stop at Mornington. We wandered down the main street where a family fun day was in full swing and made our way down to the harbour area where rumbling tummies forbade that we did anything else until we had a pie! As we munched on our pies we noticed a crowd had gathered on a nearby jetty and were excited to discover that the reason for this were three huge stingrays swimming beneath. We were enthralled as we watched them swimming gracefully and stayed to watch as a local lady climbed in to feed one of the stingrays that had unfortunately been trained to feed from humans by one of the local charter boats and had decided it didn’t really like to look for food on it’s own anymore.

We took a walk down the beach and a quick paddle in the sea before making our way back to Nora and on to Safety Beach where we were once again drawn to the sea by the sight of the cute brightly painted beach huts. After another paddle we moved on to our final destination for the day, Arthur’s Seat, a 1000ft hill in the middle of the region. The superb views on the way up and from the top gave us the chance to see right to the end of the peninsula and to the Bass Straight beyond.

After a quick ice-cream we were back in the van and once again Melbourne bound having had a great day exploring the peninsula. Back at home we had a roast dinner and prepared ourselves for another week at work.

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Photos

Sandcastles
...and a half

Sandcastles
...and a half

Sandcastles
...and a half

Sandcastles
...and a half

Sandcastles
...and a half

Sandcastles
...and a half