A Day Without a Baby

My parents and my sister had been planning a long bushwalk up in the Blue Mountains, a couple of hours west of Sydney. It was definitely not baby-friendly, so I asked the dad if my Mother's Day present could be me going on the walk. He would have to look after BB for the whole day, about 12 hours. The longest I had been away from BB before that was probably about 4 hours! So it was a new experience for everyone. 

We left about 7am to drive out to Katoomba to start the walk. It was freeeeezing at the beginning (well, freezing compared to my ideal temperature - really about 5 degrees) so we were all wearing lots of clothes. It had warmed up even by the time we got to the bottom of the first hill, about half an hour walking down. 

Basically we walked down, across, up, down, across, and up. That was on the way there. Here is a view of where we walked to taken from about halfway down the first hill. And yes, it did look as far away when we were actually there. Ruined Castle is a rock formation at the top of a small hill. We stopped for some food there and then continued on to Mt Solitary. The end of the walk might be a little scary for some people, because it consisted of clambering up almost-vertical rocks. It wasn't a problem for me because I'm pretty much as nimble as a mountain goat. I also run like a baby giraffe, but that's another story altogether. 

The views were great from many places on the walk, so I made another excellent collage because I'm so talented.

And some other little snippets:

A view of some of the vertical rock clambering that I mentioned before

A banksia man (from this book, explained more here)

The only photo of BB from that day, sitting in Grandma's toy basket

After we finished the walk, we went to get some tea and scones at a nearby restaurant. A nice reward. Some might say it's the only reason for going on a walk like that. It was a fun day, and I only got made fun of a little for talking about BB all the time.