After a nice sleep in and a leisurely morning we were on the road by noon on our way to the Kapiti Coast. Olaf drove us past their old house - the garage was way down (and by down I mean DOWN), and then there were 50 steps up! Kirsten, Shawn, and the girls met up with us and we start on our journey (north?) towards the beach. I'm not sure how long it took, we were blabbing away. The turnoff for the Wendy's came up so we all pulled off to pick up supplies for lunch. Back on the road we drove for another bit and then turned off onto a side road.
A short drive later we were actually driving on the beach!!! How cool is that :-) We found a deserted stretch to park and piled out. We had thought to have a picnic on the beach, but the wind was whipping the sand into a bit of a frenzy, so we just stood at the back of the car and fortified ourselves for the day. First order of business - Olaf and I walked back to the not as dead as we thought shark partially submerged at the edge of the water. We figure it was between 5 and 6 feet long - not a tiny little thing for sure. As I stood bent over it, thinking to touch it, I noticed the gills moving - just the wind I thought, and then I realized the wind was coming from another direction... it did a little flex... I jumped back and forgot about touching it! Poor thing.
The girls made another find - a dead puffer fish. It was quite large, bigger than a foot.
The last dead thing we found was a barracuda skeleton - the teeth on that thing were scary!
Needless to say, none of us put on our bathing suits for swimming...
Oh yes - there were horses running on the beach - wouldn't that be an amazing experience.
After several hours we brushed ourselves clean of sand and started heading home, but first ice cream. The first place we stopped was closed (it was 4:30pm on Saturday and an ice cream place was closed?), but there was a little gift shop right there that I wandered into. In the corner was a stack of tshirts on sale with a shark on them. Of course I had to get one, I mean what are the odds?
We did finally find an icecream shop that was actually open, and then we parted ways from Kirsten, Shawn & the girls. We are now back at Olaf's thinking that there might be a really good sunset tonight.
I feel slightly guilty that I'm having such a lovely time with great weather when back home is a deep freeze!
Happy Tails!
1 comment:
Although I'm a freshwater girl, now I'm totally envious. Maybe a Mako? Not a Nurse since only a single dorsal fin. Was it blue? If you drag them backwards through the water they'll revive enough to swim off. Although I've never dissected a shark, but since a fish Iassume they have an air bladder similar to the freshwater fish. A whole lot less scary looking & smaller than some of the sturgeon found here :-)
Cudas are "watchers". When snorkelling in Belize we'd see them following at a distance. They were just watching :-)
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