The tale of the trail

Well, we knew that the weather was going to be 'interesting' last Friday, but we didn't realise just how interesting. Thursday night was one of the hottest March nights on record, so even at the 8:30am start we were in our shirt sleeves and the day was clearly going to be hot...



Here you can see us as part of the gaggle of starters.



And here was the view as we headed off down the Dandenong Creek valley, through an avenue of pylons...



We made good time across the first two stages - it wasn't too hot (although it was very windy with lots of raised dust), and we got to Lysterfield Lake (20km mark) shortly after midday. It was after this point that our (or at least, my) problems began...
The track out from this checkpoint was due north, straight into the sun and the hot wind, and the temperature got up over 36 degrees. I started to really struggle and was feeling alternately far too hot and then shivering, as well as nauseous and a complete lack of strength in the legs. When we got to Birds Land Reserve, I had a fairly lengthy lie down and Marc filled my hat with water, both of which helped my get back on my feet. It also helped to know that at the end of the stage I didn't have to go up the 1000 steps, and instead could get a car ride to Olinda and an icy pole!
This meant that I felt an enormous amount better after leaving Olinda and we soon came to this sign...



After dinner at Silvan (chicken risotto referred to by Marc as 'creamy gooey love'), during which we were interrupted by numerous messages telling us that it was raining very hard in Melbourne, we set off again expecting a cool change. This came pretty quickly and we got fairly wet - though it soon stopped and we cheered up at Cafe Bob in Mt Evelyn.



The next two stages were the long distance Warburton Trail, and we made good time (we even got Eoin to skip his way out of the Woori Yallock primary school where we'd retired last year). We'd hoped that we'd seen the last of the rain, but about 20 minutes out of the last checkpoint it really started coming down. We were extremely pleased to find bacon & egg sandwiches waiting for us, although as you can see, the trail was starting to affect us somewhat...




It was very hard to go back out into the rain for the final stage, and we all found it difficult to get stiff legs working again and reattain blister-numbness. The rain had made the Backstairs Track extremely muddy, and visibility in our headlights was not much further than three or four metres. At the start of the descent from Mt Little Joe the track became literally a swamp, and with the temperature hovering close to 10 degrees and all of us soaked through and tired, the finish line couldn't come quickly enough! The last part required a rope to get down a particularly slippery slope and then splashing through a creek, but we got there to loud sounds of 'Moo' from the B Team.



As I said before, this (and the last stage in particular) was the hardest thing I've done. Now if we could just get to $10000 I'd feel it was worth it...