The point was that it was Chris’s last morning in Australia (for this trip anyway) and he wanted to spend it at Wellington Point, a good choice as far as I’m concerned because it holds a lot of happy memories for me.

The tide was out and King Island beckoned us. I took off my sandals and the sand, sharp with broken shells and coral, made me jump and wince.

“Put your shoes on,” Chris and Roland urged.

“That makes it even worse,” I said, doing their bidding.

The sand got in-between the soles of my feet and the sandals, and I still jumped and squealed.

“Oh no,” said Chris when I stood beside him for a photo opportunity, “not another photo! Don’t we have enough?”

A strange sight greeted us as we reached the island – a man covered with an aqua-blue towel was sitting on the beach.

“The view is far too beautiful for him! He couldn’t stand it any longer,” joked the man’s friend.

The man under the towel laughed and poked out his hand bearing a mobile phone.

Within minutes we were walking back to the shoreline; the tide had turned and soon the water would be over the spit. The wind picked up and our legs were sand-blasted as we walked into it. Still smarting with wind-burn and the sand-blasting, the boys and I laughed about it over coffee at the cafe.

And later on I took Chris to the airport and we said our good-byes (but I’ll see him again in a few weeks). Chris won’t see the photographs until Sunday night or Monday morning (more like) and then he’ll see the point…