Character Building

The Council announced, with great fanfare on social media, that the boardwalk around the headland between Port Noarlunga and Christie's Beach was complete.

A teaser.

I got excited.  The boardwalk had been under construction for some time and completion meant that people such as myself, cycling or walking the coastal pathway, no longer had to puff and pant up over the headland but could saunter at their leisure along the boardwalk.  The pictures on social media looked impressive.  Roger and I got to planning: ride our bikes to the train, catch the train, ride along the esplanade and the boardwalk, turn around and reverse the process.  If the cafes at Noarlunga should seduce us with tasty comestibles so much the better.

Off we went on our bicycles.

"My goodness I'm unfit!" said Roger, after cycling 50m. He cycled another 50m and discovered that it wasn't him at all - his front tyre was flat as a tack and quite unrideable.

"I'll take your spare bike instead," he said.  Which was a bright idea and would normally have worked, except that my spare bike had a broken spoke which I had neglected to fix on account of the bike being spare and not being used.

We re-thought things, resolutely ignoring the obvious option of sitting down to fix the flat tyre.  Having decided to visit the boardwalk the thought of returning another day was not acceptable.  We could catch the train and walk from the station down to the boardwalk, and back again.  Google maps told us that this would entail over 6km of suburban walking for a relatively short section of boardwalk.  We lost our enthusiasm for that idea.

Roger had a bright idea.  "We'll drive!"  

Driving was much more tedious than catching the train, but we were committed.

There were lots of parking spaces at Christie's Beach, probably because the entry to the coastal path was blocked by industrial fencing and big "CONSTRUCTION ZONE: KEEP OUT" signs.  The Council, while trumpeting the completion of the boardwalk, had neglected to mention the little matter of the as-yet-uncompleted pathway to the boardwalk from Christie's Beach.  One could walk there and back again from Port Noarlunga, but through travel was not possible without civil disobedience and we try to be both civil and obedient, at least in public.

We huffed and puffed and grumbled, and then we drove up and over the headland and parked at Port Noarlunga.  We walked out on the board walk which, true to Council's word, was completed right up to the point of the headland where it became, technically, no longer a boardwalk but a path.  

Enough to make any engineer happy, even if he can't walk all the way to Christie's beach (yet).

 

The boardwalk gave great close up views of the layered red and white cliffs, delicately eroded into pancakes and funnels.  

Reminds me of ice cream.

 

Overhead the shark plane flew in lazy, unexcited circles which was a good thing, because snorkelers bobbed in the protected onshore waters of the reef, looking for all the world like tasty shark snacks.
 

Jetty from the boardwalk.

 

We walked out on the jetty for a closer look at the reef.  Battered by the wind, fishers lined the downwind side of the jetty, along with a lone crabber.  None of them were catching anything.  People made of sterner stuff than me were donning wet suits and snorkels to go swimming.

I know it's summer.  But the wind and water are both too cold for this little black duck.

Boardwalk from the jetty.

 

We went home.  On the way home the sun came out and brightened up the day, and Short and Long were ridiculously happy to have us back.  Roger looked at his bicycle tyre which was as flat as when he left it.  He'll have to fix that but procrastination can be a legitimate art form and a man needs something to keep him busy while his wife is working, so the bicycle tyre was tomorrow's worry.

I considered writing stern words to the Council about false advertising and the dashing of the public's walking plans.  Then I considered that it hadn't really been that bad of a day, in fact it was quite enjoyable in the end and anyway a little frustration is probably good in a character-building kind of way.  So I went and had a nice cup of tea instead, and that was the end of that.

Standards are high at Port Noarlunga.