-
Saturday at the park
Yesterday I took G to Whiteman Park as has been usual for the past several Saturdays. It’s a good way to kill four hours, far better than I expected. Also it doesn’t cost very much, mostly just a drink and a ride on the train is required.
On this occasion, the Scientist had walked from our house to the park and met us in the village café not long after we arrived. This added a new dimension to our visit. We walked between the village and the Mussel Pool which is about a ten to fifteen minute walk for most people. We stopped into the Children’s Forest on the way and looked at many of the natives planted there. After the Mussel pool, e were on the way to a third trail that we haven’t tried out at the park when we ran across a kangaroo and a joey hopping along. It was incredibly exciting because we’ve never seen a joey with the other kangaroos. This was pretty close to where people were hanging out so I guess they are fairly tame, even with the little ones. I just wish I’d had my camera ready to take a shot but it was still in my bag.
We found the trail we wanted and headed off into that direction. It started off well enough, passing through a couple gates and then into a field but we hit a bit of problem once we started going through the more wooded area. There were spider webs everywhere and we kept running into them. It was close to noon and the light was quite strong, making it difficult to see the webs and spiders along the way. We eventually had to give it up because we were getting spider webs onto us, not to mention a few spiders. I guess this particular trail doesn’t get a lot of use because I find it hard to imagine there being so many along a well-travelled path.
We walked back to the village and left the Scientist while we took a ride on the little railroad there. I have noticed over the three weeks we’ve gone on the train that it’s gotten more and more crowded by the week. We had to wait a while for the train to take off. It’s hard to complain too much as it’s run by volunteers but it’s often five or ten minutes past the departure time which sometimes makes it hard to plan accordingly for things. There are two different loops the train takes and it’s possible to take them one after the other but time was limited and we had to get going after the first loop. The Scientist had meanwhile walked out towards the entrance and stopped at the lookout. We picked him up on the way out and took G back home.
-
There were kangaroos
It’s been a long and anxiety-filled nightmare of a day. I know I’m among many around the world feeling the same and I guess there is some comfort in not being the only one. But it really was difficult. I think for the first time all the networks here had rolling coverage throughout the morning and into the afternoon. I don’t normally watch television much during the day but it was hard to break away from. The Scientist sent me off to refill a prescription in late morning and it was a case of taking up way too little time. When I returned I made the decision to get out of the house and away from media as much as possible. My destination was our local Whiteman Park to do a long bit of walking while listening to music on my phone.
This should have been simple enough but I realised just about the time I reached the entrance to the park that I’d left my earphones at home. I often can zone out while walking so the only course of action was to return home and retrieve the earphones. It’s not that it’s far away but it’s tedious to take the time to do that trip again. Just before noon I arrived at the park and found decent parking without having to weave through the many parking lots around the village centre. Once there I applied sunscreen and then set off. I realise it would have been more effective to do the sunscreen at home but better late than not at all.
My walk was on the longest trail, which as a short and long version. I’d done the short version, albeit in a long way (after taking a wrong turn) on Saturday but today I wanted to do a lot of walking. For the most part the walk wasn’t eventful. took along my camera and took lots of photos and listened to music. I tried to listen to a Crowded House album that I find pretty soothing to hear. Sadly I just wasn’t able to zone out even though the music was pleasing when I wasn’t distracted by angry thoughts. Once that finished I moved to an Augie March album that I’ve been listening too regularly on walks. It’s got some amazingly beautiful music but the subject matter can be rather unsettling. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. Strangely I found this music worked a lot better for me and the album runs over an hour so it kept me going for longer.
But despite the improvement the effect of music on my nerves, I was still quite agitated and often found myself in various states of mind that unpleasant. My stomach had been churning all this time and I’d been unable to eat anything all day. Still I didn’t feel hungry and I wasn’t even tired from walking after several kilometres.
A brief relief came when I came across some kangaroos near the Kangaroo Flats station on the park’s railway line. At first I only saw a couple but there were actually at least half a dozen within my sights. I even managed to take several photos and my trouble thought escaped for that minute or two that I was there. It was a rather blessed relief in a sense to feel the weight lifted.
The rest of the walk was fairly uneventful. I finished one trail and then went down another pathway to another part of the park. In the end I walked over nine kilometres and still didn’t feel very weary at the end of it aside from a bit of discomfort on the ball of my foot which was already irritated by too much friction on another walk.
I did eventually get a sort of appetite after forcing myself to eat a few nuts I keep in the car for emergency purpose (hunger sickness). And now it’s late at night again and I don’t even feel all that sleepy even though I got very little sleep last night. Hopefully I will be tired enough to sleep anyway tonight.
-
Awesome walk
The day started much like most recent days, cold enough that you don’t want to get out of bed even when you know you should. The weather forecast was off by a few degrees for this morning as it was much colder than it was supposed to be, about 3C, based on our closest weather station. Anyway, I dragged myself out of bed eventually and got moving a bit. Ate some breakfast and washed some dishes before starting a stew meant for dinner.
I’ve been quite lax about taking the dogs out for walks lately and I needed some exercise so I packed them into the car and drove to Whiteman Park, which is a few minutes away. I started out next to the dog park and would have taken them there had there not already been some other dogs there. I wasn’t in much of a mood to deal with the mad barker today. Besides, I was rather keen to walk on one of the trails through the park as we did on our last visit. I started off on one of the paved trails and we wandered along, with a couple of stops for doggie clean up along the way, until we reached the village. We wandered around the periphery of the village, in front of Caversham Wildlife Park, and through the parking lot, until we reached the opposite side of the village. From there I went looking for one of the longer trails to walk and eventually did find it. Turns out this one was a bush trail and not paved. This didn’t bother me but I kind of thought all of the trails were now paved. The bush trail was a delight to walk on for both me and the dogs. Lots of soft ground for their little paws made them much happier, especially as our walk became more and more extended.
I had taken my good camera and found a lovely little hideaway under some trees where I wanted to take some photos. I stopped the dogs and pulled out the camera and it wouldn’t come on. Seems I’d left it on the last time I used it or it had been knocked into the on position. It wasn’t working for me so I put it back. I didn’t think my phone camera was going to work for what I wanted. It might have worked but I am still learning quite a bit of how to use it…and mostly just getting used to such a different interface. Later on I did pull out the camera to take some photos of a banksia flower but I only used it in auto mode as it seemed to be doing okay with that. We ran across a bunch of magpies at one point and the dogs got rather excited while I got a bit nervous. It’s not magpie season yet, so I probably shouldn’t have worried. Anyway, many of them flew off, disturbed by the sound of us walking along the trail. It was actually kind of a spectacular sight at that moment, with the sun starting to drop in the sky and the birds all flying together.
We carried on walking and I began to wonder if I’d gotten in a bit deep on the walk. Not so much for myself but for the dogs, who aren’t the fittest they’ve been. They did keep up pretty well although I did slow my pace a bit too. I’d seen a sign saying it was 2kms to the Mussel Pool from there, via Lookout Hill. It seemed to take an awfully long time to get to just Lookout Hill and from there it was supposed to be another 500m to go. We did stop there and climb the lookout platform where we could see the city skyline in the distance. I don’t quite know why this surprised me as we can see it from near our house and we live really close to the park with our neighborhood backing onto the edge of the official park land. From there the path was paved all the way and it surely was more than 500m long. But it was in this section of the park I had the greatest delight, seeing what I thought were wallabies several times. Now I think they might have been grey kangraroos as I think they were a bit bigger than wallabies although not the biggest kangaroos I’ve seen. I tried to take photos a couple of times but they roos had hopped away before I could get anything in a photo. We walked on and I came across more of them, about eight altogether. I tried to get a little closer but then they all bounced away too. I saw one last one in the bush by itself but it was too far away to get it in focus and was surely going to move. But what an awesome sight they were and this was in a state park where we are free to visit.
This was far more impressive than seeing the animals in the wildlife park on the same site. We’d been to the wildlife park before it resettled into Whiteman Park and it was pretty cool to see. But it was so much neater to see the creatures in the wild. The same goes for the many of the birds we’d find there. Although I’ve never been keen on caging birds as pets, I feel even more strongly about it after having seen birds like cockatoos and galahs in the wild here. I don’t even have to go to the state park to see those as many of them fly through our neighborhood and can be seen nearby.
We finally did reach the mussel pool area although it took me awhile to get my bearings there. I eventually found my way past and back to the dog park where I took he dogs for a drink of water and brief sit down before returning home. I have made a mental note to return to the park soon without dogs so I can take it all in without worrying the dogs are tiring.