Ellie has decided that she loves to have adventures. Particularly like the ones that we had on our family trip to Tasmania. The idea of walking through the bush, exploring the plants and picking flowers is very appealing to her at the moment.
And if walking gets a bit tough and we need help to keep the momentum going, there are plenty of fairy tales that we can adapt into games.
Ellie spends a lot of time on the ipad and has an amazing repertoire of all the traditional fairy tales plus all the modern classics and popular movies and TV shows. Far from stifling her creativity, the ipad has opened an enormous world of many genres and she spends the majority of her non ipad time immersed in some self concocted fantasy land. A land inspired and built out of all of the content that she has been consuming.
Today's Adventure was Boambee Headland. We drove up to the Sawtell lookout and parked our car at the top. A bit of inclement weather was rolling in but this did not deter Ellie. We put on jumpers and walked down the track towards the sea. As we got to the bottom of the downhill section it started to rain. I asked Ellie if she wanted to go back to the car. She said no. So then I asked her which way she wanted to go: left or right.
She chose right. So we walked down to the wooden platform above Murray's beach. Had a photo, and a look at the beach, then turned around and went back the way we came. Ellie was not interested in exploring beaches today.
We followed the path around the lower edge of the headland. It is a well defined path built out of sturdy pavers. On either side of the path lots of seaside heath and weed plants were growing. Walking was slow as Ellie explored each different flower and picked a selection from each one that she entrusted to me for safe keeping. Each park bench we came across we had to sit on in order to power up for the rest of our journey. The rain settled and the sun gradually came out and started to warm us up enough so that we could take off our jumpers.
The view on the sea side was spectacular. The waves crashing into the craggy rocks and heaving of the sea was glorious to behold.
As we moved around the corner, away from the sea and walked towards the entrance of Boambee creek the vegetation surrounding the track became more dense. There were less wild flowers to pick, but Ellie's imagination kicked in with games about the big bad wolf waiting in the forest for little red riding hood; and of course, the three Billy Goats Gruff as we crossed a small bridge on our path.
We made it to the lower car park in time to meet a woman walking back the way we had just come. Ellie, still in full fantasy mode, declared that the woman was a Vampire, ahhhh!
She discovered the cliff faces and immediately wanted to climb them. There was a small copse of trees that she had to explore, loving the idea of entering the deep dark forest. She dearly wanted to climb the trees but found out that they were covered with green moss and were slippery. A small pile of sticks heaped up like a campfire inspired her to add more sticks and then try to rub sticks together to make a pretend fire. We then had to cook sausages and marshmallows using twigs that we had collected.
Once the bitey mosquitoes found us, we decided to leave and climb the road way back to the top of the lookout. Climbing hills on roads made for cars wasn't too much fun until we played Little Red Riding Hood again. At one stage a man in a car pulled over to see if we were alright. I guess we looked a bit strange.
At the top of the hill we discovered the two water towers and imagined how much water they would hold and what it would be like to go swimming in one. We decided that you would have to be a very good swimmer, because the bottom of the tank is a long way down and the water would be very very deep.
All of that adventure made us very hungry, so we set up on a picnic table and ate our lunch. It must have been lunch time because so many other people drove up in their cars and ate their lunch at the lookout too.
After enjoying the view, and finishing our lunch, we knew it was time to go.
I wonder what our next great adventure will be?
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