Aus Orienteering Champs - Rest Day

Friday, 5 October 2018

After 6 straight days of running we all finally got a rest day. Phew!

We're staying in Lyndoch in the Barossa Valley surrounded by hectares and hectares of vineyards, so the obvious thing to do on a rest day was to go cellar door visiting.  However for two reasons I decided to drive to one of the last remaining areas of native forest in this region instead.

The first was because I'd generally rather watch paint dry than visit wineries. The second reason was because I wanted to revisit the area of my first ever major orienteering competition at Kaiserstuhl conservation park. 

 I'd forgotten what the terrain was like and it was actually really nice - particularly on the nice sunny day we had today.  I did a long-ish but easy hike to a lookout and back.

There were lots of delicate spring flowers out, and quite few heavily laden mother kangraoos who looked like they were housing reluctant teenage kangaroos well past their move-out-of-home date!  I also bumped into some germans who claimed they still hadn't seen any living kangaroos on their entire journey from the Gold Coast. I think they just didn't know where to look.

I don't remember too much about the event in 1986 although I've just looked up the results and I was 7th, behind Clare Hawthorne (5th) but ahead of Nic's sister Sue. The whole experience must have been a good one as by 1990 I'd been back to the mainland to orienteer quite a few times and I was heading off to JWOC with the Australian Team (which included Clare Hawthorne and Jonathan McComb).  The results show that Jon was also at that event, but he didn't do so well, taking 106 minutes on a course won by Blair Trewin in 46 minutes.