47 is not the new 30. But I'm okay with that.

Yesterday five of us piled into one of the Unit* vehicles and headed south. After a lovely drive, including a few miles/kms bouncing over a corrugated dirt road, we arrived at the campground and set up the tent. Four of us elected to sleep in the tent; one set up his super-duper swag.**

As dusk fell, the night grew confrontationally chilly, but as this was not a low-impact camping area by any means and there was a dedicated fire ring, and plenty of firewood available from the campsite office, we indulged ourselves in a campfire. (As much as I love them, I seldom feel I am in a position to have one — either I am in genuine wilderness or the only firewood available is that which I would scavenge from the surrounding woodlands, neither of which are circumstances that make a campfire At All The Right Thing To Do.) There was also beer involved. And someone brought marshmallows. (This is Australia, so, alas! no graham crackers or Hershey bars.)

Sleep was problematic. Despite wearing six (YES, six) shirts, two pairs of pants, socks, gloves, a scarf, and my ludicrously over-the-top furry hat, and having a silk bag liner, a fleece bag liner, a pretty good sleeping bag, and a Thermarest, I was bloody cold all night. And I know I snore, and I was terrified of keeping the others awake, so every time I felt myself snore, I awoke in horror. (The others said they didn't even notice.)

Still, the next morning, off we went. My hiking partner and I had agreed in advance to take it gently. This hike was a rogaine, or orienteering event (I'm still not sure what the difference between the two is; is there one?): we were looking for markers in the bush, navigating to them with map and compass. And I have to say, we did a pretty good job. We found every one we set out to find, including the one we had to wade into a really cold river to get to. I would have been happy to find six; I think we got to about 10 by the end of the six hours. The weather was great, not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny — perfect. And we saw literally a dozen or more wombats, along with wallabies, kookaburras, crimson rosellas (parrots), lyrebirds (well, we heard those), etc. etc. And it turns out my hiking partner was a whiz-kid at Australian birds and botany, and he showed and told me tons of interesting things in between crawling around in the scrub or dragging ourselves up to the ridgeline.

I feel very smug about the bush navigation. The other events like this I've been on, I've largely tagged behind people who knew what they were doing. Sure, I've had some training in bush navigation, but I hadn't really taken too active a role before. But my hiking partner and I worked very collaboratively, and we were not that dissimilar in bush-navigation expertise. (It helped that he's a serious sailor and I have a pilot's license — map-reading is somewhat idiosyncratic for different modes of travel but there's a lot of overlap. Although we were both abashed that we had to take so much time to work out how the grid-north-to-mag-north conversion actually worked out in terms of what bearing we decided to take. We're both a little out of practice, I more than my hiking partner, who, luckily for us both, was able to convince me of his point of view.) As a result, we actually used our realio, trulio bush-navigation skills and got the results we wanted.

Now, lots of things hurt. I've been relatively out of shape recently, and not particularly resilient in a lot of ways, but today that didn't matter. We did what we wanted to do, and accomplished what we wanted to accomplish, and it doesn't really matter that my joints are no longer as brash and elastic as they once were. That's the tradeoff that they told me about when I started martial arts: the body does, unfortunately, get stiffer and more cautious, but the heart gets wiser.


*"Unit" refers to my SES Unit.
**The swag pictured in the link has the unfortunate brand name of "Burke and Wills." If I were making camping equipment in which I wanted people to have consummate faith, this would be one of my top brand names not to pick. Here's why.