Fraser Island Bushfire

Article: Bushwalking Basics

The link below is to an article that looks at the basics of trekking, or as I prefer to call it, bushwalking. This particular article looks at how to get started with bushwalking.

For more visit:
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/outdoor/trekking-basics-getting-started.htm

Sabbatical Over

My much-needed sabbatical from online activity is now over and I am returning to my Blogs and websites. It will probably take me a little while to get back on top of things, but I have started, So normal service to return fairly soon I hope.

Check In: Day 2 of Holiday

I have had a most interesting couple of days on the road and in the bush. Currently I’m in a motel room at Woolgoolga, near Coffs Harbour on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Australia. ‘Hardly the wild,’ I hear you say, and you’re quite right – it isn’t. The weather was beginning to change I noticed on the final leg of my day’s itinerary, so I decided to hide out in a motel room for the night – good decision, it’s pouring outside.

I won’t give all away – I’ll leave the main description of the holiday to the website – but just some of the ‘downlights’ of the first couple of days for this post.

I didn’t arrive at Cathedral Rock National Park until just on dark, but did get the tent up prior to darkness arriving – when it did, it was dark! The campfire took an eternity to get going as all of the timber was damp and by the time I got it started it was time for bed – all-be-it an early night (7.30pm). I had decided to not spend the money on replacing all of the gear I needed to replace for camping, following the loss of a lot of gear over the years due to storage, etc. I hadn’t done much in the way of bushwalking or camping for years due to injuries sustained in my car crash and a bad ankle injury, so I left it all a bit late. I figured that for this holiday I’d make do and replace the gear with quality gear before the next trip. In short, I’ll get by – but it would have been nice to have some good gear just the same. It was a very cold night let me tell you – and long.

When I reached the heights of my first walk today, standing on top of Cathedral Rock National Park, my digital camera decided to die on me. I knew there was something wrong with it during the ascent as it was really chugging away taking pictures. I did get a couple of reasonable panoramic shots on the top of Cathedral Rock before it died, so that was good. I took stills with the video camera I was using, so it wasn’t a complete loss. When I completed the Woolpack Rocks walk I made the trip to Coffs Harbour to seek a replacement and got one for a reasonable price. It’s just another compact and so I will also buy a digital SLR prior to my next trip I hope. My previous SLR was basically destroyed when the camera cap came off during a multiple day bushwalk and all manner of stuff got into it. It wasn’t digital so I didn’t bother repairing it.

So tomorrow – off to Dorrigo National Park I hope and several lengthy walks I haven’t done before. Hopefully the rain will clear.

 

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Floods and Holidays

The last couple of times I have been on holidays there has been plenty of rain about the state (New South Wales). It all really started with my trip around the state back in January – it started raining prior to my trip and flooding continued through it. It really hasn’t let up since then. It is probably flooding as much now as it has ever since that trip back in January. For almost 12 months New South Wales has been getting a drenching – which is a change from the drought we had for the best part of ten years prior to the rain.

Once again, as I contemplate the possibility of heading off somewhere for a quick holiday, the vast majority of the state is in flood or being threatened by flooding. The promise is of a lot more rain to come in the coming week or so. So what to do?

 

Storing Your Articles, Clippings, etc … Evernote

If you are anything like me and love to travel, you will have loads of articles, magazines, newspaper clippings, brochures – you name it – relating to places you want visit, etc. Over time (and generally a short time for me) a collection of these resources becomes quite the stockpile and there is then a major storage issue. Where do I keep all these things? How do I store them? Should I keep them?

Let me offer you a solution that works for me – or rather, I should say, will work for me (I have only just started to do this after all). Let me introduce you to Evernote:

http://www.evernote.com/

Evernote is a place that allows you to remember everything (they say that), simply by storing every note at Evernote.

Evernote is a web application that allows the user to store just about every type of note you can think of on their site – for free. There is a Premium account option (which I have) which considerably widens the usefulness of Evernote, but the free version is also very valuable.

How do I use Evernote? I use Evernote in a number of ways – but for the purpose of this posting I’ll limit the description of how I use Evernote to just the one simple way.

At Evernote you can use a ‘notebook’,’ which is really just Evernote’s way of saying a folder, to store various ‘notes’ in. These notes can be anything from a photo, to an article, to a clipping, to a receipt, to a … well it just goes on.

So I have a notebook devoted to ‘wilderness and travels.’ In this notebook I keep articles, brochures, leaflets, clippings, etc, of all pieces of information relating to destinations and places of interest. I no longer need to store them around the house, as I have them neatly stored away at Evernote, which is fully searchable and easily accessed. So now all of the clutter, boxes of articles and magazines, etc, will become a thing of the past as I store them all away at Evernote for future reference. I may never use all of them, but they will be there should I ever need them.

Check out Evernote and I’m sure you’ll find a 101 uses for this great application and site.