Going through the boxes

Thursday, 31 May 2018

While the under-house area is drying out, Jon and I have been sorting through all the boxes of stuff we brought upstairs.

Mostly it's been photos and trophies and an awful lot of Christmas decorations but amongst it all Jon has found some gems from the 80s & 90s, including his SA Junior Orienteering tracksuit..

complete with the badges he won and sewed on himself..

I found this old article. Imagine a time when an ankle injury to a junior orienteer could make it into the newspaper..clearly they had too many sports reporters back in those days!

Basically the article was about me being worried that my stress fracture would jeopardise my chances of making the Australian Team for the Junior World Championships. I notice even dad got a quote... 

Spoiler Alert - I made the team.  But as dad suspected, due to limited preparation and a lot of cadbury's fundraising chocolate I wasn't that fit in Sweden . Nethertheless it was great fun and changed my life as I met a) Jon and b) the au pair of Harald and Linda.

Clare was also mentioned in relation to the 'intensive' training camp held just after the selection trials..

Although the only intensive part of the camp I remember (just) was the intensive night of celebratory drinking on the first night. (kids i hope you aren't reading this).

Anyway - Jon found the glasses he wore to a party back in the 90s.. very cool.  We also found a photo of the actual event but he's living it up in Stockholm at the moment so I'm not sure where that picture ended up.

I also found evidence of my short lived sailing career. This was the pocket of the expensive blazer we had to wear in the Tasmanian team that travelled to nationals in Glenelg. I also remember that we had to wear blue wooden clogs, skirts and white shirts.  Very fancy.  

I was a forward hand rather than the skipper of the boats I went to nationals with. I did end up with my own boat - a tired old thing called 'Birubi' but it was impossible to compete against all the people with new sails every year (mine were 10 years old), so in about 1986 I sold the boat and used the money to go to my first interstate orienteering event in SA. Hmm.. maybe Jon was at that event sporting his fancy new red tracksuit !