Hiking

Monday:

Weight this morning 80.1 kg, up a little.

I knew today was going to be hot, tomorrow very hot, Wednesday stupidly hot. So if we wanted to be outside at all, it needed to be this morning. We went to a park by the river, but the kids didn't approve as the playground equipment was all on sand and they didn't want to get sand in their shoes. So we went for a walk. "Along the river" quickly became an almost vertical climb up the side of the ravine. There were steps cut into the boulders and carefully placed rocks, up and up.

And up and up. A couple of times I stopped for a rest and claimed I couldn't go any further but we kept going until we got to the lookout more or less at the top. At least I think this was the advertised official lookout, there was a little plaque on the rock but no fence, I didn't go too near the edge! My calves were hurting quite a bit and I bet I'll wake up stiff and unable to walk tomorrow! I took some photos from the top but they don't really show clearly how steep it was or how high above the river, which you can just see between the trees.

We climbed down again (hard on the knees), had a rest in the shade, then drove home and had some ice cream! It wasn't really part of my diet plan for the day, but then neither was an exhausting hike in the heat. More than an hour later after a rest, ice cream, and a cool shower, I was still hot and tomato-red in the face. And rather shaky about the legs.

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.