G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 46.
Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, my bad experiences in drivers education class, and cocktail recipes thrown in for good measure.
I’m telling the story one weekly installment at a time, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 45 letters here, used as a coaster for some rum punch.
Thanks for reading!
Luke
The living is easy in Freo. And after three days in a little apartment on the north side of town, we were fat and happy.
We’d spent the previous day on Rottnest Island, following little furry quokkas around and failing in an attempt to ride bikes from one end of the island to the other.
Oscar and I went to the beach and dug holes.
I’d gone for a run along the ocean.
5th December 2019 - North Fremantle
The initial run was ok, nice spot for it. Large quantity of people down on Leighton Beach and Cottesloe Beach at 8 am. I ran past two schools where parents were dropping their kids off for the day.
I remember those days where the grind of the school year dwindled as the days grew brighter and longer. I remember an electricity in the air, my brain on full alert and my stomach having that feeling it gets when it knows something exciting is going to happen. Impending freedom.
I wonder if those kids I saw were thinking the same thing?
A trip to the grocery store provided some excitement.
The IGA, though a very nice shop and a thoroughly enjoyable trip with Henry, was unremarkable save for some girl being in there in her underwear. Quite possibly it was a swimsuit, but despite making an effort to confirm in the least pervy way possible, I could not.
It’s hard not to like Fremantle. It’s the second oldest settlement in Western Australia, founded in 1829. Its location makes it special. Sitting at the mouth of the Swan River, Fremantle was an important gateway inland. Perth, now the capital city of WA, is a few miles upriver.
Freo’s age means that it’s filled with history and classic old buildings from the 1800’s. I like the feel, the size, and the way the bougie vibe mixes with the industriousness of the port and parts of town that are unpretentiously gritty.
Of course there’s the water. Being on the Swan and the Indian Ocean means you are never too far away from the sparkle of water, and a quiet moment watching a boat pushing up the river or the waves rolling up one of the beaches.
So the four of us were enjoying ourselves, maybe a little too much. That’s a sign, when you’re on a long road trip, that it might be time to move on.
Tomorrow we would leave for the region called Margaret River, a little knob in the far southwest corner of Australia where the land turns to the east, and the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. Once there, we’d be back in the bush, back in our tent, back to roughing it.
We decided that on our last night in the big smoke of Freo, we’d go out to the pub. Katie had tracked down the one person she knew in town, an old friend from work who’d moved west to Perth from Melbourne.
Seeing people we knew was an experience we did not often have during our road trip - it was by and large a solitary pursuit of only the four of us, just us chickens.
7th December 2019 - Freo
Tonight, we walked down to Clancy’s Fish Pub, apparently an institution in Freo. Met an old work mate of Katie’s, Norel, husband Brent, and three boys Liam, Fraser and another one whose name I did not catch. Three kids is too many to remember, I’ve decided.
Very nice people, we had a good time, though Katie and Norel dominated the chat. Lots of old work stories, discussing each of their coworkers in turn and trading goss about what they were up to.
Kinda boring for me, for Brent too I imagine.
But Katie was having a ball chatting with her friend, so who was I to complain? Brent and I plied ourselves with beer regardless.
The kids had a different strategy. They exited stage left as soon as possible and headed for a giant grassy field that lies next to the pub. They were accompanied by a large collective of other kids from the pub, and I suspect some neighbourhood hoodlums as well.
We attempted to keep an eye on them, but all quickly disappeared, blending in with the throng of frenetic activity that children pull off so well. Footy games broke out, cricket balls flew, wars began and ended. Freak and intentional injuries occurred and healed quickly, and - as can be expected at this sort of chaos - things got broken.
The kids dicked around behind the pub on the huge grass field that’s there. Oscar somehow broke one of his thongs, which have surprisingly lasted since the beginning of the year.
We were remarking earlier in the week about how burnt out his thongs are, flattened to a barely usable state like they’d been repeatedly run over by a tractor.
Luckily for us and for Oscar, going barefoot is a perfectly acceptable thing in Australia. I can say with some confidence that I could go out today and find some bloke at the grocery store who has no shoes on.
I find this practice both something that makes me grind my teeth, and wonderful. Teeth grinding seems to be a common response to those who grew up always wearing shoes, and then taking them off when indoors. There are lots of studies around about the extreme amounts of bacteria your shoes pick up when you’re out walking around.
Just the other day I was walking down the footpath, and a dog was peeing on a construction cone off to one side. I watched as a river of yellow liquid made its way to the gutter. The owner was on her phone and did nothing, but what could she have done anyways? Gone home and brought back a bucket of water?
And the dog, let’s just say that I pity city dogs, having to pee right in the middle of the footpath, or pooping in the tiny square of dirt right next to a tree, because that’s the only option.
So considering this, then throwing in a few rusty nails and some broken glass and you’re talking about wandering through a minefield, shoes or not. That bothers me.
‘Watch where you’re walking,’ is the common response by the shoeless, one that comes with a shrug.
‘Wash your feet,’ they’d say.
Yes, but.
Admittedly I do like how free and easy it is, just heading out of the house with no shoes and no cares. So what of it? A list I found on Reddit offered what I thought to be a decent list that describes the motivations around the phenomenon:
Reasons for walking around barefoot in Australia:
Busted a plug
Related: Hate wearing thongs
Too hot for socks (and shoes)
Doing sport after work and not wanting to run round in dress shoes
Proximity to water
Proximity to sand
Playing lawnbowls
Too drunk to wear heels
Being barefoot comes with no limitations as far as I can tell either, possibly outside of going to church, hitting up fancy restaurants, and maybe being in Parliament, though I cannot confirm because I don’t often find myself in any of those places.
There are no laws against driving barefoot either, which I fully support. When I was 15 and in high school, I took a drivers education class. The best part of the class was driving in the simulator.
The simulators were nothing more than a large box with a steering wheel and two pedals attached. There was a chair with a seat belt attached, to protect you when you rear ended that guy in the 1982 Pinto who hit his brakes in front of you.
In a dark room in the bowels of the school, there were about 15 of the simulators sitting and facing a large screen where a grainy video was projected that showed the drivers point of view, like something out of a dashcam.
One day we were doing a highway night driving simulation, so I decided it would be a good opportunity to get comfortable for our fake road trip, and slipped my shoes off and onto the ground. I was in the middle of taking evasive action to try to not side swipe another car when the teacher Mr. Arrington approached.
He was famous for having the largest head of any of the teachers at Dubuque Senior High School, one of the largest heads I’ve ever seen actually, and it was always a shade of red like it was being overfilled with steam and about to burst. It was shaped like a watermelon, and would have won a blue ribbon at the county fair.
You can imagine such a thing pulling up next to you in your imaginary car, like a UFO, or a cop in a zeppelin.
‘Grab your shoes and get out of here," he said, kicking me out of class for the infraction of driving without shoes.
At this point in our road trip, we were still nearly 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) away from our Melbourne home, but at least we didn’t have to worry about shoes.
In any case, the only known fix for a busted plug on your thong is to hold the plug in place with a bread tag. I confirmed this through the internet, though I do not recommend searching for ‘thong held together with a bread tag’. Just take my word for it.
Alas, we did not have any bread tags on us, they’re never around when you need them.
Oscar walked home barefoot and wearing a secondhand hat with an Australian flag on it that I found yesterday on the footpath at Rottnest Island.
True Aussie.
The next day we packed up and said goodbye to Freo. The drive south went through Perth’s suburbs, and suburbs of suburbs, places with names like Leeming, Booragoon, and Cockburn.
On the way, we stopped at a liquor store. I went in looking for a bottle of wine, and came away with more than I bargained for after an encounter with the rum man.
8 December 2019 - Fremantle to Big Valley
The shopkeeper at the International Beer Store wore a faux Hawaiian shirt and yellow glasses. He taught me the 1-2-3-4 rule of making a proper rum punch, this because I said I am a ‘rum man’, when actually I’m not.
Things you tell to the guy at the liquor store.
My rum days are long over, and even when they were in full swing they only consisted of getting a rum and coke as my first drink on mug night in college, at a bar called Peoples in Ames.
Regardless, according to the man in the know, Plantation Rum is the way to go, but you can settle on Mount Gay and you’ll be fine. Grove, a Margaret River distillery, is shite, he said. He wouldn’t recommend that to his worst enemy, for the money.
Anyways, the 1-2-3-4 rule of rum punch, from the guy at the liquor store in a Perth suburb:
1 part sour - grapefruit juice, lemon, lime, something like that2 parts sweet - sugar syrup
3 parts rum
4 parts water
Put over ice. Then shake.
Beautiful, he said.
This I must try, this summer.
You should too, no matter if you’re somewhere trying to capture every last moment of the waning summer sun, or are on the cusp of those beautiful and hot days and balmy evenings.
No shirt, no shoes, no problem.
Enjoy, until next time.