Okay, I admit it: I’m freezing.

Here we are on the south coast of Western Australia at the tail end of summer and I’m freezing. Not all the time. There is a window of about three hours mid-day where I warm up tolerably, but in general, I’m cold.

It’s ridiculous. I know this. It comes from spending most of the year line dancing on the equator and not really wintering in almost five years. My blood is thinning. This admission qualifies me for the cone of shame in Canada. I hang my head. Shivering.

Southeast Asia has two seasons: There’s hot and wet… and then there’s hot and wetter.

Australia is cool and dry. Yes, I’m aware that Perth had one of their hottest summers on record, but clearly we’ve missed that part.

I may be freezing, but I’m also loving it.

Everything smells fresh and crisp, like fall. It’s perfect walking weather, and I’ve been walking a lot.

Today I walked across the big boulder rocks that roll right into the sea at Green’s Pool.

So many people have told us we must visit, and so we did. They were right, all of them. The boys snorkeled and mountain goated all over the giant rubble. I snuggled into The Man to stay warm and watched insane people leap into a frothy, cool sea and float like seals on the the currents running between the rocks. Part of me wanted to strip to the skin and follow them in. But the part of me wrapped in leggings, tunic top and hoodie over that won out. I stayed dry.

The boys would tell you that the highlight of the day was the snake.

This was not the highlight of my day. I do not like snakes, of the green, garden, innocuous variety we have in Canada. Snakes of the hyper-venomous, dirt brown, easy to step on and highly lethal variety, need not apply. Add snake shiver to cold shiver, and this girl’s got goose bumps.

I breathed in the sea air and marveled at the huge tubes of surf rolling endlessly against the rocky shore, threw my arms wide and pretended I was a kite, lifted by a string from my belly button and floating up, up, up into the air. I flew down the coast, over the endless white sand beaches of this coast and dipped into bottle-glass green coves filled with pelicans and fish that leap from the water.

It was one of those moments that looks like absolutely nothing but a crazy girl standing on a rock with her arms outstretched but is the entire universe expanding on the inside. The absolute miracle of my feet leaving prints in the aubergine coloured sand on the far side of the planet, on a beach I never could have imagined in my wildest dreams rippled my skin with delight. That we’ll be spending the next nine or so months on this continent feels like the biggest Valentine’s Day gift wrapped with the fattest red velvet bow I’ve ever seen.

Every now and then, my life bowls me over like a toddler in a surf wave and I just want to shout, “WOW!!!”