03 August, 2008

50 Years plus 3 days

The birthday boy made it through his 50th with no damage sustained. We had a very quiet day on Friday, spent the morning at home and then headed off to the beach with the rellies for a stroll along the sand and some time spent collecting sea shells. It's something we do far too infrequently, we live in an absolutely spectacular part of the world and we only seem to go to the beach when we have visitors.

Friday we saw four (yes that's 4) people at the beach- and two of them were working cast-nets trying to catch bait fish or prawns for fishing. The beach extends for about 20 km- soft, flour-fine white sand so the density of people was about 0.035 people per kilometre.

Lots of interesting shells to be found and a few were collected to make their way to Canada with Dee's sister. One of the most interesting things we saw were groups of soldiers crabs making their way across the beach. Small troops of bright blue-shelled crustaceans traipsing across the beach ridges on whatever their appointed mission was. When you approached them, they would do one of three things:

A) Keep on going in their loose formation

B) Stop and pull their bright red legs in close to their shell and remain immobile in the hope you couldn't see them

C) Find a soft spot in the wet sand and quickly burrow out of sight.

Yesterday was the regular Saturday coffee ride and today we had a leisurely ride out to the dam and back. We had hoped to ride out to Oak Valley this morning to see the finish of the 120km Charters Towers to Townsville race but had to deliver Dee's sister and partner to the bus stop so we drove (Shock-Horror!!) out to the finish. I had every intention of riding this race but after getting sick in June, I just didn't have the fitness to carry it off. Next year; there's always next year...

Back to work tomorrow =8^( C'mon weekend!!

Cheers
Ride safe
BoaB

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