Easter Orienteering

Saturday, 15 April 2023

We're recently back from the Easter 3-day orienteering competition near Cooma in NSW.  Aside from one night in a cabin in Canberra we stayed with Alexa, Lyra and Andy in a super-comfy house in Berridale - about 90 minutes south of Canberra.

The terrain of the competition was really fun - day 1 was a sprint at ANU in Canberra which was luckily held during a break during torrential rain showers.  

Days 2 and 3 were held about an hour's drive from Berridale - there was a fair bit of driving all up, but I had managed to book a car with 4 regular sized doors and some boot space (as opposed to our Sydney Sardine Car), so we were generally pretty happy:

The weather near Cooma was pretty freezing - in fact on Day 3 it was 4 degrees and hailing as I walked to the start. Thankfully it held off for most of my run as I become extremely blind in the rain as my glasses fog up.  The photo below is of me taping Jett's shoes back together before his first bush competition (it didn't work). This wasn't even the 'cold' day but everyone is wearing puffa and/or rain jackets - I was extremely glad I bought mine!

After that event we drove around to Jindabyne to catch up with people and play frisbee golf - luckily Andy had arrived with a bag full of them so we could all play:

The photo above is of Zali, Paul and I taking our final shots into the basket on the 9th hole. We managed to land them all and take a very tight team victory ahead of Andy, Jett, Tracy & Lyra, Jon and Will.  

The next evening (after the cold day), we also came back to Jindabyne to have an easter egg hunt by the lake.  This time Paul, Clare, Susannah and more Bluetts joined us which was nice.

Back at our house in Berridale we played board and card games until we ran out of steam in the evenings - it was really lovely to just relax and hang out. 

The sun finally came out on the last competition day as we ran around open-ish paddocks with big boulder groups just 10 minutes from Berridale:

The highlight of this day was Jon receiving a well deserved Orienteering Australia award for Services to Coaching which unfortunately I wasn't able to witness as I was deep in a selection meeting at the time.  I caught up with him later for some photos though:

Which is when I took a closer look at the trophy...which raises sooo many questions that I wouldn't even know where to start.. 

Anyway - nudey-running-neanderthal-man aside, as a family we had a good Easter.  Jett had some good strong runs in M20E, despite his shoes falling off his feet for many of the kilometres.  Zali toasted the competiton in W20Sport, Jon was a strong 2nd in his class against his former elite competition, and I squeaked a 2nd place with a really good run on the last day.  

It felt like a short trip but it was really great.