Day 29, Coochiemudlo Island and The Cow House
I thought it might be a good idea for Zoe to do something out of the ordinary while Sarah was away, to help pass the time, so I booked The Cow House, one of the Quirky Cottages on Coochiemudlo Island for a couple of nights. I'm thinking it'll be a fun goal to work our way around all of the islands in Moreton Bay eventually, and Coochie is an easy 20 minute barge journey from Victoria Point, so it seemed like as good a starting point as any.
So I packed the car up this morning, and after my 8am chiropractic adjustment, we set out. I'd initially thought the barge left at 9:40am, but I was relieved discover it was 10:40am. That extra hour up my sleeve made things much less hectic. It was a 40 minute drive from home to Victoria Point, and we arrived with enough time for Zoe to have a quick play in a nearby playground before we had to drive onto the barge.
The house is nothing to phone home about. In fact the mobile coverage is so patchy, phoning home would be rather difficult. It's an old two bedroom fibro shack, with a painted concrete floor. It's been nicely painted in cow print and themed extremely bovinely. Zoe loved it. There were stuffed cows everywhere. She even found some cow slippers. There's chickens running around loose outside. My biggest beef with the place is the fly screens aren't intact, and there are plenty of mosquitoes about. I'm going to have keep Zoe lathered in mosquito repellent or we're going to have a bad time.
There is a good supply of kids' dress up costumes, and Zoe's been prancing around the house in a pink princess dress any time she gets the opportunity.
I brought the bike and bike trailer with me (which ended up making packing the car more of a challenge). After Zoe's nap, we went for an explore around the island by bike. There was no road around the outside of the island, so we followed the main road along the width of the island, and reached the other side in about 5 minutes. The tide was out, so we decided to return back to the house to get our swim gear and come back and have a bit of a splash around in the water.
We biked back in our swim gear. I'd bought Zoe a pair of water shoes so we didn't have to worry about what we were walking on, and I wore my snorkeling boots. The tide was out, but it looked like it was coming back in. We walked out to a big pole that was in the water marking some rocks and then started walking back again. Zoe was a bit standoffish about rocks in the water, and generally a bit apprehensive of anything strange along the way.
I spotted a mud crab in really shallow water by the shore, and brought Zoe over to see it. It had half buried itself in the sand, so I nudged it with my boot and it came out with its claws out, and Zoe completely freaked out when it started walking in her direction and she gave the most bloodcurdling scream I've ever heard her make (way worse than when she had her last vaccinations) and she climbed up my leg like a rat up a rope.
That was the end of that. She wasn't very interested in walking along the beach lest we run into any more crabs, so we biked back to our side of the island, had an ice cream and returned to the house so Zoe could have a shower and I could start dinner.
Zoe's sleeping in a king sized bed tonight, so we'll see how that works out. Bedtime has been a little bit interesting because of the change of surroundings, and there's been a lot of pining for Mummy. Hard to say if it's because of the nap today or the different sleeping arrangements.