A Week Without Internet
We arrived in Perth on Sunday evening after an uneventful 5 hour flight. I did sit next to a young German man who was in Australia on a working visa. He was very thoughtful and looking for meaning and adventure in his life. At 22 he was very focused on finding a partner, being a dad and having a life where he was engaged with his family. In Australia his first job was taking care of three young boys for a family. He told me that the father was hardly ever around and he didn’t want to be that kind of dad.
After arriving we headed to a small 3 bedroom home about 10 minutes from the airport just for the night before we headed down to a town called Margaret River. We were picked up by the family that owned the home and we at their house by 10 PM, which was actually midnight in Cairns. We were all pretty tired and went straight to bed. I awoke the next morning to a very quiet neighborhood. I went for a walk around 5:30 AM and found a really beautiful park about 2 blocks away. I tried to make phone calls but didn’t have any phone connection, which would be a sign of things to come this week. There was no internet at the house by the airport so we headed out by 10 AM to the AirBnB in Margaret River. I checked the reservation and realized that the house we were staying in was really nice but it didn’t have internet access.
We spent the next 3 hours in the car driving down to Margaret River. We had been to so many different beach areas in Australia I was wondering if we should have just spent the whole week in Perth. We arrived in Margaret River around 1:30 PM and I had planned to attend a Rotary meeting on Monday night at 6 PM where they were giving me 10 minutes to speak. My main objective at that meeting was to find internet access for the kids for the week. We walked around town that afternoon and had lunch at a tavern that actually had free wifi for customers. So, after lunch we plugged in the kids computers and they started doing their schoolwork with Karley. Ilise and I went grocery shopping, something we have been doing a lot of! Ilise was starting to get a bit sick of all the same stuff since we have been here for 7 weeks, going to the same grocery stores and seeing the same foods. We couldn’t shop for more than a week anywhere, so we kept buying the same basic foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We returned to the tavern to find the kids working hard at their schoolwork with their computers plugged into the power strip on the stage where bands play each night. It was a pretty funny site J We picked up the kids and headed back to the house by the beach, oh, did I say this house was by the beach? We are in a town called Prevelly, which is about 10 minutes west of town right by the beach. One of the best surf spots in the world is about a 10-minute walk from the house. I found out the next morning that the beach is absolutely spectacular!
I dropped Ilise and the kids, along with Karley, at the house and headed to the Rotary meeting back in town. This blog is getter a bit long so I will start a new blog post about the Rotary meeting.
To be continued …..
Larry Kesslin 