It's not always easy to have two people travelling together, day in and day out, and have both people always get what they want.
There needs to be some give and take. Some days you both want the same thing, sometimes both differing ways can be accommodated, sometimes one doesn't mind what is done and so they go with the flow.
We seem to take it in turns with all these scenarios.
But where we seem to run into trouble (as I'm sure all couples and travelling buddies do) is when one person really wants one thing, the other really wants something different and both cannot happen concurrently.
Today, when we were at a lookout at Tathra, a small beach town on the southern end of the New South Wales coast, Brad spied an awesome rocky outcrop on the other side of Tathra main beach and said he wanted to go there.
I was happy to get closer to these rocks but, after looking at Moon Bay - the place on question - on the map, I pointed out that THIS side of the river would be easy to get to but that Moon Bay would be hard.
I could see that he was simultaneously angry and disappointed; it was clear he wanted to go to Moon Bay, even though it looked a bit tricky.
Sensing his strong desire to go, and knowing that we didn't need to be anywhere else, I looked more closely at the map and figured out how to get as close as possible.
I started driving.
On this windy road with a car up my arse, I was looking for the dirt road turn off to the right and missed it.
Annoyed, I looked for a safe space to turn around and tried again.
This time I pulled in successfully only to find a dirty big sign saying, "Road Closed". Boo!
Back to the map, I looked for a different road that would get us close. I drove on the sealed road, got Brad to look out for the road on his map on his phone and we missed that one too. It was even more obscure than the first one.
Rather than turnaround, I had a back up plan: a sealed road that would get us in the right general area, and we would then walk from there.
And so we did.
I parked near the locked gate and we walked along a fire trail, confirming with Google Maps on our phones as we went.
After about 1.5km on general windiness, we found the single track that went down to Moon Bay Beach, and it was deserted!
Apart from a few sea hawks munching on a meal on the crisp, white sand beach that is.
We walked the length of this small, gorgeous, clean beach and before I could entertain the idea of stripping my clothes off to get in the surf, we headed back to the car to get water and find somewhere to eat.
This photo, taken by Brad, was what the path looked like right down near the entrance to the beach.
More than an hour after leaving the car with only our phones and the keys, and having spotted kangaroos, a kookaburra, many birds, a wallaby and an echnidna (!!) I quietly celebrated that we'd done it:
We'd got Brad what he wanted, and that's important because to have a happy life together both people need to regularly get what they truly want, even if the thing doesn't always make immediate sense to the other person.
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