Dumbells

On our way home from the Gold Coast we stopped in Sydney to grab something.  While we were there I spotted a kebab shop. "kebab" is Australian for shawarma.  Confusing, I know. Once I sorted out that little mystery a few months ago I was on fire.

 About two doors down from the shawarma place that is in the Australian Witness Relocation Program was an "op shop", better known as a second hand store.  It's not even sensible to suggest that I wouldn't be having a solid look.  But wait, it get's better!

In a cardboard box labled "free or by donation" were dumbells. They are only 3.5kg, but beggers can't be choosers and I am missing my Canadian home gym, so I tested them out first...

Yup, they are dumbells.  Ordered kebab and then asked A to keep an eye on them while I went in to the shop to make my donation.  Under her watchful eye they managed to escape by rolling in to the street, a busy street at that.  No bother for a woman who had just done not just the 21k Spartan that I did, but put her shoes BACK ON afterwards and went and did a 7k victory lap just for good measure.

 

Weights rescued from the street, we carried our kebabs and dumbells to the car and headed for Mudgee.

Welcome to Mudgee dumbells.  You made it a heck of a lot further than your former roomate, the yummy kebab.

The Accidental Hike in North Tambourine

I will start off with a confession.  When our family goes on bush walks we show up prepared.  We have the appropriate clothing, including footwear, plenty of water and some snacks. I confess that have judged those whom we have seen out in thongs and a skirt and I have judged them to be less intelligent than myself.  Now I get it.

So the day started off normally and after a while of hanging around at our accommodation, A and I opted to go for a walk up around the local lake.  There were no plans for the day that involved us and we wanted to see the Gold Coast.

We wandered off and sure enough we stumbled up signs for a women's health expo.  We're women, we like to be healthy. Done.  So we hit the expo and it is just rooms and rooms all full of vendors and SWAG! SO. MUCH. FREE. STUFF.  We tasted probiotic concoctions, we got free pens, free toothbrushes, candy, water, glass nail files (shanks?), crayons, juice, FUDGE and so much more.

Then we get a call from the men in our party, apparently we are part of an expedition heading out for the day and they are coming to pick us up. So we hop in the car and we are off. Do we need our wallets? Well too bad as the blokes don't have house keys.  Footloose and fancy free we set off for what we are told is a trip to a local town that is a *must see*. 

It turns out the first stop is a family lunch so we ducked out by grabbed the car and headed in to the local town.  At least we thought it was the local town.  After driving past the restaurant a couple of extra times about 10 minutes apart in our search for *the* town we found *a* town and just went with it. We stopped in to the local IGA to purchase lunch.  The deli counter ladies were lovely. They cut us up some cheese and meat and even sliced the rolls for us. #winning We picked out some fruit and hit the check out.

So it turns out that in *this* town they can't accept tap and pay from my phone at the grocery store and that is the only payment method that we have between us.  Uh oh.  Don't worry, leaving our groceries at the cash and walking out wasn't the most embarrassing part. NOT AT ALL.

The most embarrassing part was when we were in line at Subway ordering our lunch (we checked to be sure they took tap and pay) and one of the lovely women who served us at the deli got in line right behind us and made eye contact.  Yup, there it is.  If we could have melted in to the floor we would have.

Humbled, and with subs in hand we drove to a lovely look out spot to eat and...

admired the lovely view.

I can't imagine how amazing it would be to live here.  The views on a daily basis would just be incredible. Would you get tired of it?  I mean, that would suck.  If THIS vista become boring then I feel like it would take a lot to top it.

 Here's A catching an amazing panoramic shot.

With time still to burn and there not being much to do in *this* town (why did people say it was a *must see*?) we opted in to a bush walk.  In to the woods we headed with our thongs on

So we hiked the Cedar Falls Track in Mt Tambourine National Park.  Keep in mind that taipans, pythons and paralyzing ticks live here. The Australians say that it is a "class 3" hike. No bother. Thongs, a singlet and a skirt it is. Now I understand.  To be fair, I have a blister on the back of my heel from the Spartan Race anyhow, so it isn't like any other footwear is even an option.

 The trees here were pretty cool.  This one fell over and took a boulder the size of a small car with it in it's roots.

This tree here...well...it was dark and mossy at the bottom with a ball like lump coming out of the side...and the it went straight up, with a slight curve, right up the sky.  It's possible that we laughed so hard we cried...

I would love to know what was going on above.  It just looked nifty.  Clearly that meant that I needed to be in the photo with it!

 Finally, we found the waterfalls.  Quick, I need to get a selfie with the falls!!

 LOOK!  A WATERFALL!!

It was shortly after this that our party realized that after wandering around *the* town that they had not yet caught so much as a glimpse of us.  So we drove 15 minutes to meet them, passing the restaurant once more for good measure, only to discover that *the* town was 3 minutes away from the town that we had been hanging around in. It is fair to say that I understand pretty clearly why we were not asked for directions even once more for the rest of the trip.

4 months today

Dave here.

I tend to be a bit of a numeraphile.

As a few examples, Saje and I have been married for 5013 days as of today. Personally, I think that deserves some kind of major recognition event since putting it into days makes it seem much longer more amazing.

We have been parents for a collective total of 7535 days when adding both children together. That's almost exactly 150% of how long we've been married (to the first decimal place at least). That value will never happen again in our lifetime.

Hopefully point proven. QED.

The biggest number that stands out to me, however, is 4 months. We're 4 months into our Australian adventure and I feel I represent all of our family when I say that I feel we're making the most of it. The vast majority of it has been 'up' time, where we're on the go and on the road or in another city taking in all that it has to offer.

As such, I won't lament about how quickly it's going, but rather point out a few of the photos that may not have made the first cut on the blog. Here we go:

Mid-air on our way here - the leg from Vancouver to Ghangzhou

 Our first visit to the boy's school and learning about the COLA - covered outdoor learning area

 The amazing view in Leura of the 3 sisters - literally eating our on the edge of a cliff

 Our first (and still favourite) wine tour

 The craziness of the drive through the Blue Mountains to get to Sydney / Manly for our family adventure away.

 The iconic moments where we have seen some of the traditional touristy stuff too

 burying Big C in the sand in Manly at his request

 A weekend away in Oberon with more amazing views of this vast country

 Showing Canada pride wherever we can - like the Carillion in Canberra

 and finally one of the most beautiful sunsets from the edge of the Cudgegong river.

Brisbane Spartan Race Report

To start off, I'll let you know that I completed the race and have earned my first ever Spartan Trifecta.  I am writing this blog post on my phone, so if the autocorrect makes me say things that don't make any sense, please forgive me.  I'm still in the Gold Coast.

 So we drove to Sydney on Friday morning and caught a one hour flight up to the Gold Coast.  I acted like a 3 year old at the window of the plane as it was landing!  Everything was so beautiful and there was just kilometers and kilometers of gorgeous beaches and coastline.  I took about 10 photos while my friends laughed at me.

These friends are the right friends to have as they know people in the Gold Coast who are letting us crash at their place.  Their place is about 90 minutes from the race site and we needed to be at the race site by 6...so the alarm went off at 3:58 am.  Ugg.

What you can't see in the pre-race selfie below is that I am so worked up that I am practically wetting myself by this point in the day.  I know that I have 21+ kilometers ahead of me and I am absolutely terrified.

 Rob and I had agreed to run the course together so I at least had the consolidation that he would be able to tell the medics where to find me should the need arise.

All too soon the agreed upon wave time was announced and we were off on the course.

 For those of you who like that sort of thing, here's a couple of versions of the course map.

 His is the elevation diagram in feet and miles.

This beauty below is a new obstacle. You have to climb up the lower wall, then get out under the overhang (it angless outwards as you can see) and then on to the cargo net and then finally down the inside.  I tried to get good photos...I did my best, but photos were not the primary objective here.

 Rob and I were chuffed to have both made it.  I should say early on that we agreed to make it more of a "selfie Spartan" than a "take no prisoners and try to kill ourselves Spartan".

 Below we are at the highest point that the course hit.  This was around the 7km mark and it was a long hard climb to get to this point.  We were trying to get a shot of the hill top behind us, but didn't do well with the photo.  Some people ran past us and mocked us for stopping to take selfies.  Meh, we ran past them a few minutes later.

 What I am trying to capture in the photo below is the most horrible sandbag carry I've done to date (isn't the most recent one always the worst?). We grabbed HEAVY sandbags and then had to climb up a trail with challenging footing for about 400m.  Coming down the same 400m with the sandbags still on with the uneven footing was very hard.  It was the only obstacle all day that I actually wanted to just not finish.   We had earlier carried sandbags for 1km and then had to cross balance beams (slippery, wet, muddy balanced beams) with them.  My back and shoulders were screaming!

So this bloke rocked up behind me wanting in on the selfie :)

We also did the usual stuff, up and under walls, threw a 20kg slam ball over an 8ft rope, carried a 35kg slam ball for what felt like an eternity.  The standard fare.

 I feel as though these two photos are out of order.  I'm not in the top one, but it is a great shot of what we had to do here.  There were 4-6 trenches like this all in succession. They smelled only a little bit not like sewage.  We had to get through them by any means necessary. So we jumped, we swam, we crawled.  We made it.  And we were absolutely, abhorrently filthy.

Update.  I found photos of me in this gunk (not my most graceful side):

Below is a shot of the rope traversee at the 13k mark.  This one has been at every Aussie Spartan this year. The backs of my knees are very torn up and do not take well to showers today as a result!

 There's lots more of course, but I only got a few shots (I did need to spend some of the time actually completing the obstacles!).

Some of the obstacles not listed here include the Toblerone,  balance beams (without sandbags), 2+ kilometers of wading and swimming through muddy ice cold creeks where we could not see the bottom or get a reasonable foothold due to the underwater boulders and gravel, rope climb, same monkey bars as in Melbourne, kettle bell loft, kettlebell carry, spear throw...and so on.

My Garmin says that we completed the course in just under 5 hours.  The official results are not up yet, so we'll leave that there for now.

Here I am in my fancy new Spartan t-shirt squishing that nasty hill that we had to climb up.

Things I am glad that I didn't know before I knew them: 1-there is a fast attacking, deadly snake up here called a taipan.  Once this thing bites you have about 5 minutes to live.

2:  pythons are not uncommon in these parts.  

3: Anna saw a snake slithering across the course while she was running.  

Had I known these things before showing up there is a much higher likelyhood that I would not have come. I found out about the snake spotting a full 20 hours after it happened.  Shudder.

For those of you who are asking, I have not yet set a record. Two Canadians completed a single Australian Spartan Trifecta in 2013.  To set a record I will need to do this all aging one more time.

Stay tuned, I'm registered for a second round in September and October.

Sometimes I Open my Mouth and my Mother Comes out.

As a child, adult, I still do this, I am one to leave my messes behind me when I leave a room.  Crumbs on the table or counter used to drive my mother to distraction.  Eventually the only real solution to that was to move out.

 So the other day Big C was setting the table.  The table was not clean.  I said to him "but that table is FILTHY, it is COVERED in crumbs. He looked at the 20 or so crumbs on the table and looked back at me, very confused.

 Oh snap.  My mother and I had that same conversation in the 80s and 90s.  Many. Times.

Stuff

This week has been a reasonably quiet one, all things considered.  We are in the final stages of planning our upcoming trip to Queensland and making preparations for Grandma's arrival.

This map is alternatively up on the wall and on the table as I plan our campervan driving route the 2000km from Brisbane to Cairns.  Along the way we will be taking a full day tour out to see the Great Barrier Reef and hanging out at various awesome beaches and such.

This morning after I dropped the boys off, I swung by the local grocery store and bought some meat from their clearance (just about out of date) section for dinner.  Then I went home and blew a wad on a huge trip.  I live in contradictions.

 The weather look gorgeous, but it is actually quite cold and windy.  The fire has been lit for more than 24 hours straight now.

I have an escape plan though!  I am flying to the Gold Coast in about 18 hours to earn the last pie piece of my first Australian Spartan Trifecta.  The Gold Coast is about 10 hours north of here and is forecast to be MUCH warmer.  I am happy to do that for a few days!