Mountain Walks

As i was flicking through the photos I was going to add to this post, I realised that they consisted of mainly scenery photos and 1 chicken. Which I guess is all any off us need in life.

Now as some of you might know I’m all for a bit of exercise now and again. Bit of running. Bit of biking. Bit of climbing. The key word there is bit. You see one of the crew members onboard at the moment is a machine when it comes to running. A marathon is basically a warm up for him. He doesn’t really start sweating till he hits the 100 mile mark. So he decided to round a few of us up for a a nice, easy and simple 14 mile jog from the top of wellington mountain back to the ship. It even sounded simple to me at this point. That distance is almost walkable really. In fact that’s what a few of us decided to do. The views were supposed to me amazing from the top, so why waste them by sprinting past them?

We weren’t far wrong… We were pretty chuffed when we hit the top of the mountain after a 30 minute taxi drive to the top…

So while most of the group sprinted off, the rest off us just started the walk down gawping at all the views…

We had time. We’d worked out we had at least 6 hours to complete this walk. Plenty of time to take it easy and capture all the shots we wanted.

So we carried on walking…

…and walking…

Ok. So it soon became clear that the best views were at the top of this mountain. The route back down was simply returning down the same tarmaced road that the taxi had driven up. Which was certainly pretty, we all admitted. Very pretty. In fact I even took a photo of the road and the trees along the side…

… and kept walking…

… and taking sips of water and walking…

1 hour… 2 hours…

… The tarmaced road just continued on.

I began thinking of the places I would be willing to walk to along a tarmaced road, rather than taking a car.

Would I walk from my house to my parents house? Maybe 7 miles. Nope. If I told anyone I was going to do that they’d think I was mad. Would I walk from Leicester to Nottingham? Nope. A bit further granted but still just as silly.

… and we began to realise how silly we really were.

3 hours… 4 hours…

It was hot. Really hot. One of the highlights was certainly the chicken. Clever little bird realised the heat was not a good look and hid well in the shadows… Images of fried chicken were flashing infront of my eyes….

Many hours later we finally made it to the city of Hobart. The long walk along a seemingly endless tarmaced road was coming to an end.

We were feeling a bit haggard at this point. We’d had a couple of moments when we decided that a short jog would help earlier on in the journey. It was all taking its toll and we realised that although we were feeling super peckish, if we stopped at a cafe we’d almost certainly seize up and not make the last mile to the ship. We kept trudging on.

Dragging our feet a bit and finding our hips were pinching a little.

Ouch.

We climbed back onto the ship feeling like heroes. Fake heroes. I mean all we’d done was a walk 14 miles. We hadn’t saved the world or anything.

Day 1 – Day 5 post walk: The hobbling continues…

Next time lets just jog it.