Since about 1998, I've been talking about walking from the Melbourne CBD to Frankston in a day. On Saturday, I finally got around to it, in the fine company of Pat and Mark.

As the crow flies, it's around 40km, but with a few detours to stick to the beach as far as possible, we ended up covering fairly close to 45km.

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   - Elapsed time was a shade over 11 hours including a luxurious lunch-time stop at Black Rock to chat with Chris, Lucy and the kids and then clear out two local shops: the local bakery of its pastry products, and the local menswear shop of its fresh woollen socks.
   - The route was pretty much as per the map below, except we took the beach-side promenade in a few spots, and between Chelsea and Seaford we walked on the beach a fair bit. Distance was probably bang on 45 km including all the little detours around the creepy jelly-fish on the beach. Mark kicked one and it TOTALLY moved, I swear.

Highlights:
   - Mark lost a glove, realised it, and then a kind lady walked past and told him she saw it about 200 metres back. Mark went back and got it.
   - Later, Mark lost both gloves.
   - Later still, Mark noticed Patrick's gloves were suspiciously similar to Mark's lost gloves. Drama ensued.

   - With about 13 kms to go, we were walking in darkness along a stretch of beach just before Seaford. The city lights looked amazing about 30kms behind us, and in front of us, the sodium-yellow lights of Frankston were doing that creepy night-time thing where you walk and walk and walk and walk, but they don't get any closer, even though they seem no more than a few hundred metres away. We'd checked google maps, and the beach was clear and passable all the way to Frankston. Which was strange, because a couple of hundred metres later, about 250 tons of heavy earth-moving and construction equipment loomed out of the darkness, surrounded by red and white "do not pass, this means you" tape completely blocking the beach. As we approached, a security guard came wandering down and said "sorry, you can't come through." By this point, we were going to be stuck with a seriously annoying detour to go back up to the beach, cross the highway, and then come all the way back. I went for the shocked empathy/sympathy angle and said "we're trying to walk to Frankston, what's the quickest way around?", but before I got to the end of the sentence, he'd already said, "awww, come on, then, go on through." Resolution: I want to see if this technique works more generally... next time a bouncer's giving me trouble at a pub, I'll just come out with "hey, go easy, pal, I'm just trying to get to Frankston", and see what happens. Not sure what I'll do if I'm in a pub in Frankston.

       On reflection, it was lucky that the guard was posted there. I'm fairly sure Pat would otherwise have hopped onto the Liebherr digger (which was about half as wide as the beach itself) and driven it direct, Rommel-style, down the beach to Frankston, then turned left and plowed directly through Bayside shopping centre to the station.

   - With about 10 kms to go, we'd hopped back over to the highway and Mark and Pat were feeling the distance in such a way that the pain was eased by alternatively jogging ahead quickly and walking backwards slowly. It was dark, and a semi-scary old-ish lady with a shopping cart was walking towards us. She passed Mark and Pat (who were jogging backwards at this point), stopped, and turned to watch them for a second. When I reached her, a few seconds later, we had a quick chat:
         Lady: "What, are you trying to get fit or something?"
         Me: "No, we've just walked from the city."
         Lady: "You've done WHAT?"
         Me: "We've walked down from Melbourne."
         Lady: "WHAT? That's what the TRAIN's for."
         Me: "We just found out about that, we're going to catch it on the way back."
         Lady: "Pffft.", walks away.
 
   - When we got to Frankston station at about 7:30pm to catch the 7:40pm train back to the city, we were met by a sign saying that trains were to be replaced by buses, starting at 8:10pm. We could deal with this - our train would still run. But then the good-cop bad-cop routine started - there was also a station staff lady asking everybody walking towards the platform "What are you doing here?! There are no trains! NO TRAINS!" Intrigued, and keen to get to the bottom of the issue in case we went to queue for the bus just to see a train pull out of the station five minutes later, I asked her "So, the sign's wrong then? It says that the buses don't replace the trains until 8:10pm. Should you update it?" And she said "No, the sign's right. It was for last night. Tonight's different. THERE ARE NO TRAINS!"
   
       I couldn't argue with that. The mistake was entirely mine for reading the sign on the wrong night. Cowed, we boarded the bus, and were carried home in silence.