Orienteering weekend
This weekend I tried something I've been meaning to try for a while - orienteering. Apparently it has become quite a serious sport. This weekend was the NT championships. I went with a friend from soccer (Antonella), and the mother of another friend from soccer (Patricia's mother, Emilia). There were supposed to be more of us, but Steve and Marianne backed out. When I packed, we had decided to camp out on Saturday, and be ready for the Sunday event, but then Antonella and Emilia decided to get a cabin at Lake Bennett resort. They offered me the floor, but when we got there, the rooms had more beds than we had people, so no camping this weekend.
My (basic) understanding of the sport is that someone goes out an puts a bunch of checkpoints around the bush somewhere, and plots them on a very detailed map. You get a map, and are timed for how long it takes you to go around the lot of them. The maps are pretty amazing - the ones we had included marks for rocks, termite mounds, water tanks, general rubbish piles, slow moving insects, etc. amazing. There were also some very serious competitors - padded gaitors, lycra warmup suits, specially designed wrist band map cases, etc. I'm always amazed at the gear that serious competitors have, for any sport. Specialized everything. I had on a pair of old hiking shoes, a t-shirt, and some jeans.
There were a range of courses, ranging from the very easy one for a 12 year old novice, to the very hard, long ones for the grizzled veterans. We did a "medium" course, which was pretty easy. By far the hardest part was that there were three of us, and some had a tendency to pay more attention to their own voice than to where we were going. Even without running, I figure I could have covered the course at least a half hour faster (we took almost 2 hours), and that's not including the 15 minutes we spent trying to find one lost member. How it's possible for 3 people to lose each other in open savannah, where the grass had been burned off, is beyond me.
In the end, we finished first in our division - 3-person novice team. Of course, everyone else did it alone and in faster times, but hey, it was a nice walk in the bush.
Actually, the best part of it was the location. The whole course was on a piece of property near Lake Bennett resort, owned by a French-Italian guy name Enrico. Really nice guy, who invited us into his "shed". He had a very nice, simple home, made from an old bush shed. He and his French wife have lived in Darwin for almost 40 years, and a while ago, bought this property, with some mangos on it. Very nice place, and a very generous couple. They invited us for coffee (good, Italian coffee), and even invited us to come visit them again whenever we wished. I might take them up on that.
My (basic) understanding of the sport is that someone goes out an puts a bunch of checkpoints around the bush somewhere, and plots them on a very detailed map. You get a map, and are timed for how long it takes you to go around the lot of them. The maps are pretty amazing - the ones we had included marks for rocks, termite mounds, water tanks, general rubbish piles, slow moving insects, etc. amazing. There were also some very serious competitors - padded gaitors, lycra warmup suits, specially designed wrist band map cases, etc. I'm always amazed at the gear that serious competitors have, for any sport. Specialized everything. I had on a pair of old hiking shoes, a t-shirt, and some jeans.
There were a range of courses, ranging from the very easy one for a 12 year old novice, to the very hard, long ones for the grizzled veterans. We did a "medium" course, which was pretty easy. By far the hardest part was that there were three of us, and some had a tendency to pay more attention to their own voice than to where we were going. Even without running, I figure I could have covered the course at least a half hour faster (we took almost 2 hours), and that's not including the 15 minutes we spent trying to find one lost member. How it's possible for 3 people to lose each other in open savannah, where the grass had been burned off, is beyond me.
In the end, we finished first in our division - 3-person novice team. Of course, everyone else did it alone and in faster times, but hey, it was a nice walk in the bush.
Actually, the best part of it was the location. The whole course was on a piece of property near Lake Bennett resort, owned by a French-Italian guy name Enrico. Really nice guy, who invited us into his "shed". He had a very nice, simple home, made from an old bush shed. He and his French wife have lived in Darwin for almost 40 years, and a while ago, bought this property, with some mangos on it. Very nice place, and a very generous couple. They invited us for coffee (good, Italian coffee), and even invited us to come visit them again whenever we wished. I might take them up on that.
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