Left Freo yesterday and tooled my way down to the wine region of Margaret River in Southwest Australia (which is actually southeast of Perth, but nobody here seems to notice or care when it is pointed out to them).  Had lunch and did some wine tasting at Margaret River's most famous winery- Leeuwin Winery, most renowned for its chardonnays (which were good).  

A little later as evening descended I headed to the closest beach, which happened to be known as Surfer's Point and, unsurprisingly, well known here as a premier surfer's beach.  

Upon arrival, I found a lot of surfer dudes and dudesses but no one actually in the water.  I found this strange... until I read a couple of plaques and signs explaining surfing at this beach and in Southwest Australia in general.  Apparently, according to this helpful sign, there is a phenomenon among surfers known as ‘car park surfing’ where surfers sit in the parking lot looking out at the crashing waves and imagine themselves catching a perfect wave, maintaining perfect balance and riding the wave all the way to the beach, all without having to get wet or leave their 1970s VW bus or put down the pipe.    

As I read this, I thought I too can be a great surfer and I imagined myself catching a huge way far offshore and then, despite howling winds,  mountainous swells and crashing breakers, riding it all the way until I stepped off my board onto the sand to the thunderous applause of the surfer crowd.  All this without having gone to the expense of buying a board, much less nearly drowning in the foam as the board whacked me in the head as I flipped over after standing up for a millisecond.   

However, as I read on, it appeared that there was here the slightly more real phenomenon  of ‘the paddle of shame’, where apparently actual surfers tried to paddle out to catch a wave but were unceremoniously tossed by the ocean into a nearby lagoon and embarrassingly had to paddle back out to the jeers of their fellow surfers.  Somehow I think that the ‘paddle of shame’ was a far more likely scenario for me than the perfect ride of the ‘car park surfing’ I had just imagined if I were ever to take up the board.  

Whoever wrote that sign got a thumb's up from me...