City to Bay Fun Run - Adelaide - Sept 21st 2008

Yesterday morning I participated in my first Fun Run. The City to Bay had 29,000 people enter this year and Adelaide put on some incredibly awesome weather for the event. I started from the Kurralta Plaza 6km start point and completed the walk in just under an hour. Technically challenged as I am, I can't seem to find either my official result or my finish line photo on the site online so you're stuck with this terrible photo of me just before the race on the balcony of the Hotel we stayed Saturday night. Yes, that's the Buffalo and the Marina in the background, 10 points to anyone who can guess the said Hotel and 20 points if you get the room number right. Check out the sunshine! And this is like 7am - it got better, how cool is that?

Next year I'm hoping to get Ella to join me on the walk, although if she doesn't want to it will allow me to enter the 12km run which would be totally wicked! I'll let you know...

The Bluff - South Australia - 13th Sept 2008

G'day sports fans. The funny looking hill you see in the photo to the left is a local point of interest for Victor Harbor on the gorgeous Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia. It is known as The Bluff and is a fantastic spot to view Victor Harbor and surrounds from.

Not a mountain by rights, the walk up is only about a ten minute slog, although the path we chose down got a bit hairy but only because the loose gravel on the track made it more like skiing than walking.

Again, the girls did great. It was a very windy day, so a lot of hat chasing went on once we got to the top and some adrenalin got produced on the trip down because I chose a very slippery, steep track. We all survived it though!


"I can see my house from here!" Yes, the lovely Thomas girls with a view of Victor in the background. I can actually see my house, but do not have the tech skills to circle it on the photo for anyone else.

This was a pretty short trip as far as bushwalking adventures go, so I don't have much else to say and so the rest of this post will be some pictures of the gorgeous Fleurieu coastline. It was a stunningly beautiful sunny and warm day. Sure it was windy, but unless you're a hat, that wasn't really a problem.

Waitpinga Beach - South Australia - 8th Sept 2008

Monday morning was a bright and sunny day down here in Victor. School was cancelled for Show Day and Kindy got cancelled due to lack of available staff(ie. Show Day...lol), so armed with buckets and spades, we hit the beach.

Waitpinga Beach is about 15 minutes down the road and is a really dangerous swimming beach, but great surf and fabulous white sand beaches as far as the eye can see. It was 18 degrees so we weren't planning to swim, we planned to sand castle with a vengeance.



We walked 1/2 a km south along the beach, crossed the river at the inlet and set up camp. As you can see, the kids got straight into some serious construction. I used the time to run some laps in the soft sand. Running barefoot rocks! Every so often, one of the girls would bore with the sand castle and come and join me for a few races, which they won hands down every time.

I wandered a bit up the beach and down the river, taking some photos, what a shock!

We ate some fruit when the castle was finished and admired the girls' fantastic creation. Then there was time for some hopping races and some jumping - soft sand is so versatile and forgiving on the joints - some admiring of dead sea creatures along the shoreline, some cuttle fish collection and it was time to go home.

Again the girls amazed me. They were tired at the end, but they had experienced a pretty athletic day and yet had not complained at all. Little champions!

Deep Creek Cove - South Australia - 7th Sept 2008

On Father's Day, we decided to go bushwalking and have a picnic. After having a quick look over the map, I decided that Deep Creek Cove looked like a nice walk and the bonus was we could have a lovely picnic down by the sea. For those of you who know me already, you would be aware that I am navigationally challenged when using maps or GPS units and this was definitely a fine example of that.

The leisurely 3.4km walk down to Deep Creek Cove was a treacherous and mountainous alley way, totally grown over in parts. I feared when we hit the top of the stairway( a wild generalisation of what I would traditionally call a stairway) that my three little angels, 6, 4 & 3, had not a hope in hell of making it down safely and even less hope of making it back up. The distance between the steps was higher than Charlotte's head in places. Me of little faith! The girls made it, well we all made it, but the girls did an awesome job and although they were tired at the end of the trip, we were all pretty pumped that we had done a rather athletic walk/climb in really good time.

The sign said that the return trip could take 2.5 hours but we achieved it in under two hours without injuries or tears(well not many tears anyway). The weather was gorgeous, 18, sunny and a cool sea breeze to stop us sweating too much from the effort. As mentioned, the "stairs" consisted of logs set into the mountainside every so often and Charlotte had issues with this because the "steps" were about 3 foot apart and she's about 2 foot high, so she adapted like the little champion she is and avoided the "steps", creating a slalom course down the mountain, around the logs, which she traversed mostly on her backside, much to the amusement of me, bringing up the rear, and some English tourists we met half way down. I figured that if the worst injury she sustained going down that hillside was a dirty bottom then we could all live with that. The picture to the left shows the track up the hill.

The following pictures are of Deep Creek Cove. It is a beautiful spot. We had a lovely picnic, an awesome day and the whole family felt like they had achieved something when we finally made it home again in one piece.