I find myself housebound this week, my children unwell for school and needing to stay home for multiple days. There have been board games and movies curled up on the couch together, while outside the window the grey clouds have closed in. It was feeling like winter was behind us for a while there, yet here we are again wearing thick socks and snuggling under blankets.
This week’s illness and cold snap have me looking forward to the summer that’s ahead. To long, lazy days. To barefoot adventures. To staying at the beach until the sun dips below the horizon.
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LOCATION: CAPE WOOLAMAI BEACH, PHILLIP ISLAND
Each summer my boys and I escape out of town to the beach, to Phillip Island about an hour and a half out of Melbourne. We rarely see people we know, unless it’s an organised catch up, and because we’re not on Port Phillip Bay, there are no city views, so it feels like we’re a million miles away from it all. Two things that are in my idea of summer family holiday perfection.
As my eldest two are keen learner surfers, we spend lots of time at the surf beaches. It’s great for them to watch the established surfers doing their thing on the waves. It inspires them to keep trying each time they fall off their own boards and gives them ideas for what they could try differently to catch the waves.
A favourite spot to visit is Cape Woolamai beach. Behind the house-filled streets of Cape Woolamai, there’s a single road into the Cape Woolamai State Faunal Reserve leading straight to the Woolamai Beach surf club. It’s well worth the drive.
Some days a storm has come through that leaves huge, majestic waves pounding the shore. Others are like this lazy, crazy, hazy day of last summer when we stayed at Cape Woolamai beach as the sunlight peeked from behind the clouds, touching the beach gently while the surfers caught the last of their waves for the day.
It makes me think of the lyrics of that fabulous songman, Nat King Cole:
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
Those days of soda and pretzels and beer
Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer
You’ll wish that summer could always be here
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