Hiking around this wide brown land

Tuesday:

I spent the morning at the Arboretum café writing, then went out onto the hillsides for a walk. There are "trails" that are literally just signposts on the grass between the baby trees.

Which makes it kind of fun. And I was wearing my new hiking boots. I walked from the café on one hill up a bigger hill with this statue thing on top:

This is a quote from Australia's most famous poem:

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,

Of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains,

I love her far horizons, I love her jewelled sea,

Her beauty and her terror, this wide brown land for me.

It was written by an Englishwoman, Dorothy McKeller, and there is a second verse about how England is pretty nice too, but no one knows that one.

And when you turn around, you get this lovely view:

Not sure about the weird spiky trees.

Climbing up the hill was fine but going down down down into that valley was a bit hard on the knees. My boots made me feel very secure though, no slipping! Then back up an extremely steep slope to the café again, I don't think that bit was supposed to be climbed. There actually turned out to be a little fence at the top that I had to step over. I had to keep my arms out wile climbing to balance. Any steeper and I would have been crawling. So I felt pretty good about powering up it. I may hate many forms of exercise, like jumping or bending, but I do like walking and climbing.

In all, 45 mins of hiking around the hills.

And I have had what is possibly my biggest win of the year so far. I bought a family size packet of chips yesterday to share tonight at D&D. And I haven't eaten them yet! I don't even know why I dared buy them, so many times before they haven't lasted an hour. These have lasted two days - an exciting new flavour I haven't tried before. Still unopened. If you have a trigger food that you usually can't resist if it is in the house, that you will eat until you are feeling sick and then put aside only long enough to feel a bit less sick then finish them, you'll know how big a deal this is to me.