Sunday 3^rd April – Orienteering, Slacklining & Acro

Orienteering

Bronwen and I got up far too early to get to Mount Coot-Tha by nine o’clock to die painfully in the forest. We registered for our orienteering then got a lift to the start point, where we found out that there were no more maps for the route we wanted to do—apparently you should print them yourself. This was a good thing and may have saved my life, because it meant we had to do the second-hardest course they had, instead of the hardest. We also didn’t pay—presumably there was somewhere at the registration place that was supposed to take money off us, but we never came across it, and by the time we realised we should have paid, we weren’t there anymore.

Bronwen went first, and disappeared off into the distance. I set off at a brisk walking pace, and managed to find the first and second markers fine. Then something strange happened. Based on the readout I was given, and also my GPS track, it appears I also found the third marker just fine, and then spent ages wandering around the fourth and fifth markers, before going back to the third again. The strange (and slightly concerning) part is that’s not how I remember it—I remember not finding the third marker, but finding the fourth one instead (because I saw someone else going to it, so figured I’d go check it out to see which marker it was and use it as a waypoint to find the third marker), and then making a stupid mistake and getting the two mixed up when calculating my direction so heading in the wrong direction until I realised my mistake, at which point I headed back to the fourth marker, then found the third marker, then continued on my way… Either way, it lost me a lot of time.

I also made the mistake of going too fast up a huge hill, which nearly killed me, and there wasn’t any water until the tenth marker, by which point I was becoming dehydrated. I was quite glad to reach the end alive, and immediately drove home with the air-conditioning up high to have a shower and eat a vegetarian hot dog.

The track (KML) can be downloaded and played in Google Earth for great enjoyment–it’s a lot of fun, you can see us running around the map.

Hard 3 4,100m, 11 starting competitors

Plac	Name	Organisation	Time	Diff	KM time
1	Murray Haines	SO.Q	1:17:27		18:53
2	Helen Breslin	No club	1:19:02	+1:35	19:16
3	Rowan Ramamurthy	EN.Q	1:28:13	+10:46	21:30
4	Dave Congreve	No club	1:30:24	+12:57	22:02
5	James Shulmeister	UG.Q	1:33:33	+16:06	22:49
6	Niamh Shulmeister	UG.Q	1:34:05	+16:38	22:56
7	Bronwen Fairbairn	No club	1:34:06	+16:39	22:57
8	David Morris	UG.Q	1:34:28	+17:01	23:02
9	Ned Martin	No club	1:56:54	+39:27	28:30
10	David Murchie	BU.Q	2:27:19	+1:09:52	35:55
11	Linda Thompson	SO.Q	2:31:02	+1:13:35	36:50

Suitcase Rummage

After lunch and recovering from orienteering, Bronwen and I drove into South Brisbane and walked across to Reddacliff Place, where Bronwen bought some clothes from the suitcase rummage and I bought the largest 7-11 Slurpee because it was cold.

New Farm Slacklining & Acro

With lots of nagging, I finally got Bronwen to finish looking at clothes at the suitcase rummage, and we continued on to New Farm Park, where we watched the acro and slacklining guys practicing.

It started quite nicely…

…but before long, Dom started picking up chicks, Webb tried to castrate himself, Hughie became an octopus, & I started to give things silly names again.