Cheep Cheep Chillax Day (Day 140)
When travelling for a length of time, it's important to have a Chillax Day occassionally, A day of chilling out and resting - and yet there is still great experiences during those days
A day chilling out, doing some admin, invoices, research and writing. I quite often write about chilling out, having space, allowing ideas time to ferment. Interesting – the best food need time to mature / brew / rise and ferment.
I saw that my great friend Julie was online, so gave her a call – the value of the internet. It was so lovely to hear her voice and we always have such a giggle. Yesterday Tim and I were reflecting on our journey and the many magical moments we’ve had. New Zealand came up very high and we wondered if that was because it has been the most recent of our experiences, so took our minds back – and then we remembered the 11 days of laughter we had with Julie and John in Dubai.
Julie has been following our journey and commented that in a world where the media focusses on so much negativity, my daily muses reminds her what amazing people there are around the world – what kindness and generosity we have experienced from so many people. And this prompted me to reflect. Our wonderful friends who we have stayed with, the strangers who have opened up their homes, people who we have met and experienced adventures with, people who have shown us around where they live and even now, housesitting, our hosts Jane and Debs have so generously lent us their car.
Just as we were finishing our conversation, Julie asked if we were serious about going to Antarctica next year. We are and realised that we need to get our skates on and book something. So as well as researching our trip to Uluru in May, I have now been exploring research ships, tours, dates and prices for January/February 2019. Even though I loathe the cold, the voyage does sound remarkable. Any tips, please send them our way. Thank you.
In between the research and writing, Tim and I went for a walk – I like to try and get at least 10k steps on my fitbit each day. We had just walked up a path near the house where we heard some very loud cheeping. I spotted something bright up in the tree - It was two Rainbow Lorikeets. Incredible colours. Tim took some time trying to get a good photo. I’m not too sure what the man putting his bins out was thinking – these birds are probably like us seeing a blue tit or a chaffinch in the UK. Fabulous birds, but when was the last time you took a photo of one?
This reminded us that we can take things for granted back home. In the UK we have such a plethora of birds – I did use to watch them each day from our bedroom window – perhaps even then that was the start of becoming a Twitcher, however I didn’t take as much interest as I do on our travels. The birds here are so noisy and many make such weird and wonderful sounds; chirps, cheeps, squawks, caw-caws.
Next, we came to a small deserted playground area for kids. Yes, I know Tim acts like a big kid, but I really don’t think the swing was meant for him. We carried on wondered which way to walk. Tim has an App on his phone Dice Roller, so we played the game where he “throws” the dice, even numbers on the top die = turn right and odd = turn left, On the bottom die is the number of roads before we turn (4,5,6 = 1,2,3 otherwise we could be walking for ages). We did this for some time amongst the residential roads and then came across a Reserve along Smalls Creek. There are a number of these open spaces with tracks and trails that have been designated to encourage people to get out and be active. We stopped playing our Dice game and walked along the footpath and then I started to jog – I’m not sure what came over me. I couldn’t jog for long – I need to do some more pelvic floor exercises (get my drift!). It was a lovely walk, we passed a lady on her bike with her daughter on the back, a few dog walkers, and elderly gentleman jogging with his head down and two couples chatting and laughing as they strolled along together. A very pleasant evening after a chillax day.
