Walked My Legs Off

Scully here - school holidays have crimped our routine but I try to remind F every day that walking is the best thing to do in all the world.

Most days I get there later than on school days and sometimes I find that F had gone off without me. How dare she have an adventure without me? I have resorted on occasion to napping with Mr B. (He gets up late).

I have discovered F goes off on early morning waterborne adventures - she comes back smelling of sea and dragging her floaty things.

Yesterday however after her paddling we had the apology walk - the walk to make up for all walk-related-shortcomings.

We set off on a usual sort of trek round the loop track - hillside through the bush - and just as we got to our usual turning place F surprised me by going off-piste ....uphill! Oh goody. I love off-piste.

Up.

And up.

And up....

Tree ferns and manuka, and monster beech trees, and weird fungi, and rocks, and rotten logs, and fallen branches, and blechnum ferns (those ones are tough going because they grow in colonies and I go underneath and F has to sort of wade through), and black sooty mold that drips off beech trees, and moss and lichen, and goat poo, and snail shells, and lots of interesting smells, and ...

Well anyway we climbed and climbed and climbed, and every time we thought the top must be close we would go over a bump and the top was still way up there in the trees somewhere.

Eventually F sat me down and confided. "That last bit was too steep with too much loose stuff to happily go back the way we came, so we will carry on to the top and at the top we'll walk along the ridge and go down the other track- the one we have already used and put markers on."

Yeah good-o; fine by me.

Now you know what we did, all that remains is to put in some photos and tell you that I chased a goat on our way down. Our expedition took us about 4 and half hours and F only back-tracked once on the way down (wrong side of a rotting log and lost sight of the track markers) and did a short stint of bundi-bashing when we strayed into some dense manuka. She clearly needs to review her track markers. She said I was supposed to know the way - I did last time - but by that stage of this walk I was beginning to think we'd been doing this for too long. (The goat-chase gave me second wind.)

F's first ever selfie. She needs to improve on these.

Marker to say we 'go down from here'. Phew

Girl - you need to smile before you push the button - more practice needed. Or stick to scenery.

F said the trek along the ridge top was like something out of Lord of the Rings. Well the movies were filmed in NZ so of course stuff hete would look like it. Meh.