"Can't wait for the Retrospect". It was a line uttered (by someone else as it happens) on the first multi-day wilderness bushwalk I ever did. The Retrospect did arrive, and it always does, and the expression has become a bit of a family idiom.

I thought this to myself a few times today as we went on our reconnaissance MTB (mountain bike) ride in the State Forest just a few kms from home. A few *other* words (of the *choice* variety) were uttered too. There were more than a few loose rocky patches, which kind of freaked out someone of my meagre MTB skills - I've never done a lot of skidding around on dirt, and loose rocks sending the bike jittering off course give me the freaking jitters. It really freaked me out on a couple of downhills.. but also on the uphills. (As if you don't have enough to contend with grinding your way up - sheesh...) [Can you tell from that last paragraph I was FREAKED ?]

But I made it, so of course, through the rose-coloured specs, it was great!

We even did a bit of cattle herding.... !! (As you'll see below...)


Looking like he hasn't even raised a sweat.



Me on the other hand - albeit after a few more, bigger, hills - face like a lobster.. (and turning sideways to the camera doesn't really make me look any smaller...I really must give up that deluded strategy of trying to make myself more photogenic.)

The forest opened out into logged areas (not so picturesque, but the reality that is "State Forest") .. and after heading down one of the more major forest roads into the area, I was startled by a cow grazing in a cleared area. (And, you'd have to say, the cow was startled by me.) Next thing we'd startled a herd of them, who decided that we were there to herd them. So they set off at a canter down the road...




(Here's a close-up.)

Check the two *white cows* of the herd. (As oppposed to "black sheep"). Heh. Marc Joke, that one.

There were a few who were dragging the chain, and as they didn't know what to make of me as I stopped to take the picture above, they careered off into the bush to the other side of the road, and crashed their way through it, trying to join up with the rest of their mates, but unable to because of a fence.




A few hundred metres down the road, the whole herd hung a left, and trammelled through some foliage, and then up and around (somehow) a gate (maybe through a hole in the fence) and then they stood in the paddock looking back at us. It was hard not to think that they had maybe got out of there in the first place, and their guilty consciences sent them haring back there at the first sight of humans. Naughty cows!


About an hour from home. Looking back from where we'd come...


.. and ahead. About another hour till home, but the "worst" was over in terms of loose-gravelled (rocked) uphills or downhills.

Labels: bike riding