Renewal is going on! During this pandemic year, most Melburnians were restricted to travelling within 5km of home and then only for food, medical or exercise reasons. So it was a great pleasure to be able to travel the 2000 km to the Sunshine Coast of Queensland once Victoria finally got a handle on the Covid challenge. As of writing Victoria has had over 50 days of zero cases of community transmission of Covid!It was obviously great to catch up with new family additions! But on the second last day news of a New South Wales outbreak of Covid including...

Little Gem - Table Top Mountain If you are looking for a short distanced hike, with beautiful sceneries, this is a great trail to get your blood pumping, and It takes less than 10 minutes' drive from Picnic Point in Toowoomba. Even though this hike only has a 2km return distance in total, it is no walk in the park. If you are just started with hiking, and have not done any class 5 and above tracks, I would not recommend to attempt this. It is a steep hike and involves some less extensive rock scrambling. If you are taking children...

For centuries foot blisters have been the curse of long-distance travellers and athletes.Today, feet are no less susceptible to blisters. If anything, less foot travel, an emphasis on fashion over function and technical efforts to avert blisters have likely taken away natural tendencies for the body to evolve skin with better blister prevention characteristics. Surprisingly, delving into the relative mentions of blisters compared with popular endurance activities hiking and long-distance running using Google Ngram(1) suggests the premise that the battle against blisters is being won! (Ngram looks at the percentage of times a particular word has been used in printed...

Bubble relief from Isolation! As reported last month Victoria was battling back from a recent Covid spike.  Happily the daily new case rate is back under 5 and hit zero for the first time in over 3 months. So now the outlook is very likely that Victoria can join its neighbouring states and New Zealand in freedom of movement bubbles in the lead up to Christmas.  So the proof is there that Covid can be contained provided that we all respect the guidance provided by medical authorities and stay the course no matter how inconvenient. The simple rules for us being; good...

Could face masks be a painless "inoculation"? The difficult reality of developing a vaccine for Covid is becoming more evident as trials by Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson have been halted.  Even though there are tens of other trials in play, achieving a persuasive and safe outcome, let alone establishing manufacture and distribution, must still be many months away. Noting of course that this is not medical advice it interests us that the evidence is mounting that masks may be performing an equivalent function to a vaccine. This theory is based on the concept that masks while limiting exposure to the virus...

   On the Heysen Trail with Brittany Brittany has now been on South Australia's Heysen Trail since August 16.   The Trail normally takes about 60 days to complete. The Trail is named after Sir Hans Heysen OBE (8 October 1877 – 2 July 1968) a German-born Australian artist. He became a household name for his watercolours of monumental Australian gum trees. Heysen also produced images of men and animals toiling in the Australian bush, as well as groundbreaking depictions of arid landscapes in the Flinders Ranges.  The 1200km Trail, is a multi-grade one-way hike that provides something for every walker,...