First, we went to the beach, to try out the hovercraft, but I've already talked about that.
I had a look on some websites, to see if there was anything exciting we could do, that was within walking distance. (What with still being carless). It said that on the other side of the harbor, there were boat trips lasting about an hour. I told A and D about this, and they thought it was suitably exciting, and so off we set. Me on foot, them on their Likeabikes. I'd checked on Google Maps, and it said it was 2.4 miles to where we wanted to go. I was hopelessly optimistic, so off we set.
We walked along a fairly unpleasant road, with a pavement. On the other side of the road was a long, thin park with a path running through it. Irritatingly, there was absolutely nowhere to cross. We had done (according to good old GM) 1.7 miles, when the inevitable "wee coming" happened, so we went into a Ralph's supermarket, and used their bathroom (as I've learned to say). Which was a bit tricky as I had to carry the Likeabikes.
It was about time to refuel the boys, so we went to an ice cream place. D was absolutely convinced he wanted plain sorbet, but he got a free sample, and that persuaded him to have strawberry.
The ice cream place was called Cold Stone Creamery, and I imagined that was just a name (Like Red Rock Cider "It's not red, and it hasn't got rocks in it" - remember that?) But it wasn't. You chose your flavour of ice cream (from a selection of about 100) and then chose a thing to go with it (from a selection of about 100). D chose strawberry/cherry and A chose vanilla ("French vanilla?" "Errr... normal vanilla" "French vanilla?" "Err.. normal vanilla" - turns out that French vanilla is normal vanilla, there's also vanilla bean, and light vanilla), sorry, vanilla/apple.
Anyway, they take the ice cream, dollop it onto a granite worktop (stone) which is frozen (cold) and stir the extra bit into it, with a couple of palette knives.
We ate that outside, and A choked and was nearly sick - I picked him up and ran to the nearest flower bed that was out of sight of (most of) the people eating - kicking chairs and small children out of my way as I ran, but then he stopped and said "I've swallowed it". Which was a relief, but didn't provide a satisfactory explanation for what I'd just done, in the way that vomiting would.
We finally got to the place that did the boat tours, to find that there were no boat tours. Well, I couldn't find a place that had a boat that was doing tours. A couple of places looked like they would do tours, and some places did special tours (like evening meal tours), but there were no tours available.
While we were wandering around, we saw a seal in the water. I was holding D up so he could look through a telescope - "There's a seal" I said. "I can see a building site" he said. The seal flopped onto the dock, looked about and got back in the water, before I could persuade D to stop looking at the building site. A asked if we were going to see the whale again.
There were also pelicans there. My main experience of pelicans has been flocks of them flying over reefy glades, with beaks full of fish, as the sun sets behind them, in a slightly idyllic fashion, and David Attenborough's hushed tones describe what's going on. But these pelicans were just hanging about on the dock - mostly by a place that sold or collected bait or something like that. Like a common seagull or pigeon or something.
Here's a pelican swooping majestically above the waves.
Here's a penguin scrabbling around for bits of food like a common pigeon or seagull or something.
This post is a bit rambling isn't it? Sorry.
Anyway, to salve A and D's disappointment, we hired a powerboat. It wasn't very powerful, but it was powerful enough for me (and for them). - 10hp, if that means anything in boat world, and 16ft long. I didn't take many photos, because I was holding onto the steering wheel most of the time. But here's one:
We were passed by a police boat, going fairly swiftly, which made big waves in its wake. A and D thought that was exciting, other than that they spent a lot of the time lying down (which confused the people at the boat place when we got back). When asked, they said that they had fun, and would do it again though.
On the way back, we had to make a bathroom break at the same place - this time we went to a health food shop across the road, which had a snack bar. A and D asked for apple juice, the person serving us took some apples, put them in a juicer and gave the boys the juice. They said it didn't taste like apple juice, which reminded me (only a little) of a child I knew once who was shocked to find bones in chicken.
We went on the correct side of the road on the way back, through a very long, thin park. One of those parks that have exercise structures and instructions on them for doing exercise. Boys thought this was very exciting ("A playground. For grown ups.") and wanted to do all the exercises. Worse, they wanted me to do them first, so they could see what to do. Luckily, we'd missed a few out at the beginning. Also, if there wasn't a structure, just a sign, they missed it. (Like the sign that said: "Number 12, do some star jumps here.")
In the end, we'd done around 5 miles of likeabiking/walking, along with all the other adventures. Which was probably a record for A and D, and meant that they were pretty exhausted. But they had come close to exhausting me. When we got home S was watching CSI. And now I have to read S's report. (It's 56 pages long, but she claims it's mostly appendices).
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