Rottnest Island

I will attempt to multi-task right now.  I need to wait 40 minutes for lunch, procrastinate from studying fluids, and keep my avid fans up to date.  The first two I can do no problem, and I am not convinced I have any avid fans, so it will be easy to keep them up to date.   I'm feeling successful already.

More likely I have just bought into the Autralian mindset as I saw it on a sign outside of a

 bookstore: 

So, compared to Notre Dame, I have been doing a whole lot of nothing here and it was about time I rested.   So we (all 30 Notre Dame kids) went to Rottnest Island to rest.

What an amazing place to be!  I missed the camp-out and the lake, but if we come up with like $50K for airfare, either event could be held at Rottnest.  Rottnest is a nature preserve, so you cannot own land and if you don't work at

 one of the little shops you can live there.  Australia has very few natural predators so the animals are pretty bold.  There are not cars on Rottnest and it seems people respect the animals.  What all these equates to is a whole lot of Quakas, snakes, lizards, and birds.  

The snake picture is from when Marty and I were just riding along...we acutally saw three during that bike ride.  The quaka picture was taken at night.  We would see them during the day, but they are a noctorinal animal, so at night they would be out in flocks, just eating grass and leaving little quaka pellets everywhere.  On Wednesday Elizabeth and I were at a cafe and one came strolling in.  He left some pellets, moseyed around the cafe for a while, then strolled out.  We were quite entertained.  

Becuase you cannot own land on Rottnest, it is just full of these little cabin and houses, nothing elaborate.  There weren't big beachside mansions or condos, because you can't own the land to build them on.  It was a very laid back kind of place.

I had a take-home final due Monday.  I do not think Notre Dame knows what that concept means, but I am a fan.  It was a final though and I wanted to put a little more time into it before turning it in.  The group took the 930 ferry, but I waited and took the 1130. 

Unfortunantly I think I inherited some genes from my mother, as I felt pretty bad most of the ride over.  There was a group of third grades going to the island for a school trip and a couple of them joined me in the back of the boat.  Only they had puke bags.  I almost had to ask them to share, but then we arrived!

Once on the island, I realized I didn't know where we were staying, but realized that with 29 other kids moving about on a small island, it wouldn't be a problem.  It wasn't.

A short while later I was cruising the island on a bike.  What a place to ride!  Gentle hills, beautiful scenery, the wind carrying you half the time, no cars, and it was a Mon-Wed so there weren't a whole lot of other bikers.

We would have big dinners then hang out in our two cabins and play cards, eat cheese, drink wine, and be compleatly content with life.  I must note that we had a really good group.  The food got cooked, the kitchen got cleaned, there was drinking, but no one was out of control.  Based on what I hear about the Notre Dame Perth group 2 years ago, I am very lucky.

Saturday I went snorkeling.  It was ok...Ningaloo was better, but I think Ningaloo is better than the majority of reef in the world.  There were a lot of fish, just not as many types and the water was pretty cold.  I perservered though.  I had lunch then set off on an epic bike ride.  I went back and calculated and it wasn't really that far, maybe 20-25 kilometers or 12-15 miles, but I haven't been on a bike in a while.

Nevertheless, driving my knees in cycles felt pretty good and I was just so happy and full of potential hanging out on Rottnest Island.  We passed some capgrouds which I initailly thought would be a lot of fun to stay at (minus the fact we don't have any tents or sleeping bags).

However, it ended with a Griswald-like situation.  On Wednesday morning Elizabeth and I thought we would go for an epic bike ride.  I'm not a weather wimp and Elizabeth is from Seattle, so a little rain wasn't going to stop us.  The weather was susposed to be bad the entire weekend, but until Wed, other than a few showers, it had been pretty nice.  

The ferry offers a convieiant service where they pick your suitcase up in the morning on the day you are ferrying back to Perth so that you do not have to carry it all day (check out from the cabins was at 10 am).  So we send all of our dry cloths and set off on this bike ride.  We start and spent like 20 minutes trying to get out of town because basically every road on the island curved, so you couldn't just assume that becuase a road appeared to go south you would end up to the south if you followed it.  In most cases if you started south you might end up 30 meters down the road after going in a loop.  But we made it out of town and we are chugging along, into the wind, but I had been going into the wind the day before so that was no big deal.  And it starts to sprinkle.  Then rain.  Then the wind picked up.  Then I think it might of been hailing at one point.  Remember, Perth basically has droughts every summer.  

But it's me and the girl from Seattle and we are both pretty positive people, so we are like, "oh it's going to pass over."  But it didn't.

We finally gave up and headed back to town.  We met up with some friends and sat in Red Rooster for 1.5 hours until the ferry left.  Elizabeth and I were both compleatly drenched and didn't have any dry clothes.  But now I have been biking on Rottnest Island during a rainstorm.  And it was fun.

Wednesday I turn my bike in (sadly) and to my surprise all of the bike story employees are watching the election results on the news on this little black and white tv.  Remember we are on an island off of Perth, Australia.  That is, an island off of one of the most isolated places in the world.  It just reaffirmed to me that the US is a big deal and we better live up to it because our decisions affect a lot of other people.

I took a ferry back, was a little seasick, then got back to Perth around 4 pm.