More picnics!

 

This time it's Westleigh's Ruddock Park, which has probably never seen such picnicking popularity! But Gladys did tell us to go forth and picnic.

Fire trails of Lockdown 2 - Westleigh's Western Trail

 

Crowded lockdown highways!

 

The view this morning on the footpath of Westleigh's Quarter Sessions Rd. Some of us do all this very regularly. But suddenly lots more are doing it! Hard to maintain safe separations sometimes.

It's going to go on for quite a while. The state recorded a record number of COVID  cases today (all delta variant), and the newly invigorated vaccine rollout will still need  few months to have any real impact.

Normanhurst to Thornleigh the long way

I took my bushwalkers the long way from Normanhurst to Thornleigh the other day. It's two minutes by train, or 20 minutes walking along the street the quick way. 

But we did it via a nice little four-hour circumlocutory bushwalkerly way. Creeks encountered: Waitara, Dog Pound, Berowra, Tedbury, and Zig-Zag.

 Upper Waitara Creek

One slightly tricky bit along Waitara Creek: you have to use a (thoughtfully provided) rope to descend a small cliff.

We're down now. The scenery is a bit dominated by the sewage pipe above our heads. Its contents are destined for the West Hornsby wastewater treatment plant, and it smells appropriately.

 

 

 

 

(Photo: Karen T)

Up the Dog Pound Creek Hornsby-Westleigh link track now, emerging near the Westleigh Fire Station.

After following the Great North Walk for a while, we head up onto Stringybark Ridge, and across the paddocks that used to be the Hornsby Pony Club.

 

 

Then it's a leisurely afternoon tea at Thornleigh's Monday Morning Cafe.

Covid countdown - the Callicoma Trail and Berowra Creek

A lot of us are doing our time during the Covid-19 'sort-of-lockdown' with the help of bushwalking exercise breaks. In Sydney we're very lucky like this.

Mind you, the bush has never been busier, but fortunately not yet busy enough that you can't do your 'social distancing' correctly.

The other day I revisited the excellent patch of bushland  in the Berowra Valley National Park between Cherrybrook and Westleigh.





The 'Lakes of Cherrybrook'

















Some nice scenery along the Callicoma Trail. The recent rains have made all the difference.

Berowra Creek looking good, especially near its junction with Zig Zag Creek, where the Great North Walk crosses it.

'Combatting viral panic, misinformation, and racism' - they're not listening in the supermarket!

The other night I attended an excellent public meeting at Sydney University. It was about the whole Covid-19 coronavirus thing. There was a public health expert, other academics, politicians, the vice chancellor, and an ex-racial discrimination commissioner. The Chinese community have been having a hard time of it recently, due mainly to the good works of public health workers in Wuhan, China, who first identified the epidemic. (I have a theory that it may have been around elsewhere for some time before the Wuhan people did their bit - they were just more on-the-ball than their counterparts in other countries.)

The theme was 'Combatting viral panic, misinformation, and racism'.

Next day I called in to the Westleigh Aldi, and the panic was fabulously on show! All the toilet paper and facial tissues had gone. And most of the rice and pasta too!

The car park was fuller than I'd seen it before, and shoppers were discussing how they'd done the rounds of the Coles and Woolies stores before coming to this generally quiet one.















Fortunately we'd had an inking of this the day before, when we'd heard the radio discussion about why you didn't need to panic-buy. So we'd panic-bought!

Blown away suburbs

Several of Sydney's northern and north western suburbs were nearly blown away on Saturday night. It was probably the wildest storm that I've ever seen, and it caused hundreds of trees to come down, some on houses, many across roads, and lots of them bringing down power lines.

The storms, and possibly tornadoes even, had been much forecast. I'd cancelled a Thursday bushwalk, which could have gone ahead as it happens. The weather came late.

Walking around my local streets afterwards, I surveyed the destruction. Our power is now back on, though many will have to wait another day or two. SES and electricity crews have converged on the area from all over the state, and appear to be working miracles.

Some random observations:

* As well as no electricity, there was no phone service. We used to have phones that didn't need mains electricity, and the mobile system fails at times like these because everyone's needing to make calls.

* Although none of the traffic lights were working, the traffic generally flowed far better than usual.

* Despite widespread gridlock in some areas because of trees down on main roads, there was almost no assistance from the 'Emergency Broadcaster', the ABC. Maybe in times gone by, before the vicious cost-cutting of its idealogically driven political enemies, it would have been different. Hardly a mention that anything had  happened, let alone what streets were blocked, and what else was happening where.

* Our local streets were full of talkative, friendly neighbours. There's nothing like a little adversity to bring a community together!