Mordialloc Mozzies

BD's friend came down from  Queensland to visit her, so she promptly ditched us to use her new-found stamina to good effect gallivanting around the city.  We all arranged to meet at Mordialloc for fish and chips beside the sea.  This gave me a perfect excuse to ride my bike from our new house sit to Mordialloc.

I meandered through pockets of bushland along Gardiner Creek, through warmth and humidity that was having a decent shot at feeling a little bit like summer.  I wasn't the only one feeling a bit warm: I came upon two beautiful black cockatoos so intent on their bath that they let me hang around and take photos.

Leaving Gardiner Creek behind, I made the most of the Anniversary Trail with it's gentle railway gradient.

Noice.

And took my life in my hands by cycling through a golf course.  Thankfully a big fence had been built to protect bicyclists from errant (and possibly well-aimed?) golf balls.

I feel safe now.

Before long I was back on my old friend  the Djeering Trail,

 and then back to my new favourite place to be: Braeside Park.

All the birds in Braeside park were out numbered by the rabbits that lolloped about pretending to be scared of me as crunched past, bouncing through potholes because I was looking at rabbits and not paying attention to where I was going.  I am not a fan of rabbits.

Cute, fluffy, and evil agents of destruction.

Aah, no rabbits.

In a rare feat of perfect timing, I arrived at Mordialloc just as Roger and the girls drove into the car park, and in an even greater feat of happy happenstance they managed to find a car park.  Mordialloc was heaving with multitudes of young men and fancy cars.  The Public Order Response Unit (I didn't know there was such a thing) was also out in force and after a long but evidently polite conversation between the two groups the young men all got in their fancy cars and drove awa,y and the PORU also left to enforce order upon the public somewhere else.

After all that we didn't even get to the seaside.  Unfortunately the public at Mordialloc all decided to order fish and chips just 5 minutes before us, so I stood outside the Fish & Chip shop for an hour waiting for our food while the girls took in the sights of Mordialloc's main street and Roger claimed a picnic table for us and sat there for an heroic hour swatting mosquitoes.  For five minutes we all sat at the picnic table, admiring the sunset and gobbling fish and chips while swatting mosquitoes.  Then we all gave up, bundled the food any old how into the picnic basket, and headed for the mosquito-free safety of the car.  We licked the grease off our fingers, squashed a few hundred mosquito stowaways, and all went home.  And that was that for the day.

A flower and native bee on the Gardiner Creek Trail.