The 2006 Xmas Letter of Brett and Karen

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Six major events caused 2006 to be an extremely memorable year for Karen and me - two of them bad, but four of them good. Take out those six events, and the year would have been the usual pretty good year. I will describe the six events a bit later, but first I will go through the mundane stuff. On the work front, my website design business really started to pick up, mainly through word of mouth and recommendations from happy clients. I still do a bit of computer help work here and there, but am really trying to wind down this side of the business - I have even removed my sign from the front of the house, and have discontinued my computer help entry in the Yellow Pages. Karen continued to do her four days a week at Bosco Accounting, handling superannuation issues as well as the usual tax work. She has weekends and Wednesdays off, because those are bushwalking days. Bushwalking, as ever, continues to play a large part in our lives. With Shoalhaven Bushwalker activities programmed both mid-week and on weekends, we probably averaged more than one bushwalk per week for most of the year, including day walks, flat water and white water kayaking, road cycling and mountain biking, overnight full pack hikes, weekend car camps and reconnaissance planning for future walks.

We also enjoyed a few rogaines during the year as well. Rogaining is the sport of long distance cross-country navigation, in which teams of two to five people visit as many checkpoints (all with different points values) as they wish in a set time period, traditionally 24 hours in duration, but occasionally 6, 8 or 12 hours. Karen and I competed in the Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad Navigation Shield 12 hour event at Wangenderry (near Mittagong) in July, but did not do too well because of my lack of fitness (I will get onto that later). We also competed in another 12 hour rogaine in the Snowball region of NSW (south of Braidwood on the way to Cooma), with two other girls, and fared much better. Regarding fitness, Karen continues her never-ending fitness regime. Most weeks she swims twice a week before work (in the ocean pool at Huskisson in the warmer months, or in the local indoor 25m pool in the cooler months), walks for an hour with weights on another morning and does an hour on the weights machine on the fourth morning. Wednesdays are for bushwalking and on weekends it is either a bushwalk or a 40km - 50km bike ride, or both. Cycling is my preferred option for fitness training, cycling with Karen on the weekends for an easy ride, but hammering a short 30km ride during the week, and maybe a longer ride (up to 60km) as well. I also play tennis on Tuesday nights in a local competition. However, it is not all sport for us. We still find time for dinners with friends and family, movies and theatre, and entertaining at home, and both of us are always in the process of reading a book. Karen started a big cross-stitch project during the year as well, and with a half acre block, there are always lawns to mow, edges to trim, weeds to pull, plants to plant and prune (and occasionally bury), and sticks and leaves to rake and use for mulch. So what were the six things that made 2006 especially memorable? I will go through them in chronological order ...

First came a walking trip in New Zealand with two friends and fellow bushwalkers, John and Gill Souter, from late March to early April. We did three walks, all on the South Island, and all based around Glenorchy (not far from Queenstown). The first walk was the Caples Track, two days of walking up the Caples River valley before climbing to an alpine pass and descending into the Greenstone Valley to finish the walk. We then spent a couple of days at Milford Sound, with one day spent kayaking in absolutely the best conditions possible. Even the guides said that they had not had a better day on the Sound! In fact, the weather was excellent for almost our entire stay in New Zealand, only the final two days of the final walk produced rain, and even then it was only a light drizzle.

After Milford we spent four days on the Routeburn Track. We thought the Caples had been pretty good, but the Routeburn was even better. It is only 32 kilometres long and can be walked in a single, hard day, but we divided it into two days, did a side trip on the third, and walked out in about two hours on the fourth day. The following day we started the Rees-Dart Circuit, which follows the Rees River up to a saddle, then drops into the Dart Valley and follows the Dart River downstream towards Glenorchy. This walk can be done in three long days, but we chose to do it in four, and added another side trip in as well, to the fantastic Cascade Saddle overlooking the Dart Glacier on one side, and Mount Aspiring on the other. We had thought that the Routeburn was fantastic, but the Rees-Dart is much, much better.

The New Zealand trip was one of the good major events. The first bad major event occurred five days after our return. On a social mountain-bike ride with a bunch of friends on a local back-road, I apparently mis-judged the size of a bump in the track, the front wheel turned sideways, the back of the bike kicked up, and I went straight over the handlebars. I can remember looking down the road towards the rough section at the bottom where it goes from being a road to being a track, and I can remember the instant before I hit the ground. Everything in between is gone, as is the first few seconds after impact. I can then remember being on my hands and knees, unable to breathe. I have been winded a few times before, so knew enough to roll over on my back and relax, and wait for the air to enter my lungs, which it eventually did - but not much of it. I stood up and made my way to some shade on the side of the road, then lay on my back trying to recover. A couple of my friends began riding back to get a vehicle for me, with Karen and Gill Souter staying with me. After about fifteen minutes, with my breathing getting shallower and shallower, I suggested to Karen that she go to a nearby house and ring an ambulance. It arrived about fifteen minutes later, and not long after that I was in Shoalhaven hospital. After X-rays, a neck brace, injections, dressings on my shoulder, pain killers, the removal of the neck brace, and five hours, they let me out saying that I was basically okay. Three days later, I was in the process of telling Karen that I thought the initial trauma and superficial pain was wearing off and I was actually feeling pain from what was really wrong with me, when the phone rang. It was the hospital, saying they had reviewed my case and thought that I should come back in for further tests. I went in next day, barely able to walk from the hospital carpark to the hospital entrance, and had more x-rays, and they eventually decided that I had one broken rib and a partially deflated lung. Follow-up x-rays a week later to determine if the lung was re-inflating revealed that I had three broken ribs. A week later I was x-rayed again (I was glowing in the dark by this stage) and the report said that the lung was okay, but it did not say anything about broken ribs so my doctor said I must have no broken ribs, just bad bruising. I asked for a second opinion and eventually insisted on getting a CT scan or an MRI. By the time I had the CT scan done, three and a half weeks had passed and I was still in constant pain, unable to sleep on my side, and I had pain radiating from my left shoulder up both sides of my neck into my skull whenever I moved. The CT scan reported a cracked shoulder blade, "partially healed" fractures to six ribs, three torn rib cartilages (I can still feel the bump of one of them), and a separated AC joint. As far as the lung went, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that the lung had fully re-inflated. The bad news was that the CT scan was showing a large spot on the lung. A month later I was showing the CT scans to a specialist in Wollongong - I would have had a nine week wait if I had chosen a specialist in Nowra. The specialist said that if I had not had an accident, and I was a smoker, he would have a needle inside me as soon as possible to get a biopsy of the offending spot. However, due to my recent trauma, and the location of the spot, he was convinced that it was just a small pool of blood that had accumulated in a space between the two lobes of the lung. A scan another month later showed that he was correct. The accident happened on April 9. The rest of April was a painful right-off for me, as was most of May. On May 17, six and a half weeks after the prang, I went on my first bushwalk. I was very careful not to trip over, and even more careful not to let anyone come near me. The ride along a bumpy dirt road to get to the start of the walk was painful as well, but the walk went okay. Two days later I did a walk with Karen, reconnoitring a potential walk in Kangaroo Valley, which involved rock scrambling and bashing through thick scrub. I survived, but I was not comfortable and really should not have done the walk. Two days later I did another easy walk with the Milton NPA, and four days later did an easy recce with Karen. Three days later I went on my first mountain-bike ride since the crash - a bit nerve-wracking, but sooner or later I had to get back on the bike. It probably took about five months before my body was feeling normal again, but the fitness I had built up with walks and rides early in the year was gone. On a ride in early July, three months after the accident, Karen was pulling away from me on the uphills and she even beat me in the final sprint to the front gate - and that never happens. Luckily, I was so unfit that even a small workout greatly improved my fitness, and Karen has never come close to repeating her performance ... In mid June, with some time off before the start of the tax season, Karen decided we would do a tour of outback NSW after reading about the Kamilaroi Highway which runs from Bourke to Quirindi. We had a great time, and went into bird-watching mode right from the start, eventually sighting 130 different species, including a turquoise parrot, a bird we had never seen before. However, we also spotted another bird that we had never seen before, but could not tick it off our Australian list - because it was not on the list! We were just outside a little town called Burren Junction when Karen called me to stop the car because she had just seen a bird she did not recognise. It looked a bit like a masked lapwing (known to non-birders as a Spur-winged Plover) but the markings were completely different. Karen took field notes while I took photos, and after about half an hour of observation we went on our way.

When we got back to Sydney I sent an email with some images of the bird to a friend of ours called Brian Everingham, who is involved with migratory birds and international wetland sites. He replied almost immediately, saying that the bird was a Grey-headed Lapwing, normally resident in northern Asia, and that it had never been seen in Australia before. Brian suggested that I make a submission to the Birds Australia Rarities Committee, so I sent an email to Tony Palliser, the chairman of the committee, and so began one of the biggest "twitches" in Australian history. Mike Carter, who currently holds the record for the most species of birds seen in Australia, was on the phone to us within an hour of my sending the email, wanting to know more details about where exactly we had seen the bird, because he was just about to leave Melbourne and make a 3000km trip round trip to see the bird. In the ensuing months, over 350 people visited Burren Junction in an effort to see the bird. And with only one known exception, they all did.

The weirdest thing about the whole affair was that Karen had taken only one book to read while we were away - a book called "The Big Twitch" by Sean Dooley, which relates the author's attempt to break the record for seeing the most Australian bird species in one year. Sean mentions a lot of famous Australian birders in his book, including Tony Palliser, Mike Carter and Rohan Clarke. One moment she had been reading about these people, and the next moment she was either talking to them on the phone or corresponding via email with them. The Grey-headed Lapwing remained in the Burren Junction area until October, but has not been reported since. It provided us with more than the usual fifteen minutes of fame, with articles about it appearing in the Border News, the Narrabri Courier, the Melbourne Age, the Weekend Australian magazine and all the Australian birding publications as well. Karen was even interviewed on air by Canberra ABC radio, and a photo of the two of us plus an article about our find appeared in our local paper, the South Coast Register. The third good thing to happen to Karen and me this year occurred in mid October when we travelled to the Warrumbungles near Coonabarabran to compete in the World Rogaining Championships. The event was open to any member of any of the Rogaining associations around the world, so it was not like we had to qualify or be invited or anything like that, but it is not every day that you get the chance to go in a world championship, so we entered. We finished 171st out of 305 teams in the Open event (all teams), mid-field in the Mixed division (teams made up of at least one man and one woman) and mid-field in the Mixed Veterans division (men and women over 40). At 53 I am definitely over-qualified for the veterans, and am looking forward to turning 55 so I can compete in the Super Veteran category! The event began at 12 noon on a Friday in 35 degree heat, and finished at 12 noon a day later when it was even hotter! The heat caused some nasty blisters on Karen's feet which severely limited her performance, otherwise our results would have been a lot better ...

The fourth good thing about 2006 was Karen's rather strange quest to have visited and photographed every trig in the Shoalhaven shire. (Trig is short for Trigonometrical Station, the markers used by surveyors to accurately calculate positions. They are usually composed of black metal circles atop a short pole which is anchored in a structure made of concrete, steel or rocks). After examination of many topographic maps, and consultation with various surveyors, the Lands Department and the local council, Karen discovered that there were 74 trigs in the Shoalhaven. Some of these had been visited and photographed during bushwalks over the years, but most required deliberate trips to "bag" them. Karen ticked off number 66 a few days ago, and plans to finish her quest by Easter next year. One trig is so remote that it will take a three or four day full-pack walk to bag it. The last of the six major events for the year, and the second bad one, was the passing away of Alan Tenney, the partner of Karen's mother Barbara. Alan had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in early 2005, and told that if left untreated, he would be dead in two months. Even when detected early, this form of cancer is virtually incurable, with nobody surviving more than five years. Alan's cancer was not detected early. On a positive note, however, is the fact that Alan made the most of his time after diagnosis, and had only just returned from two weeks holiday at Tumut in the Snowy Mountains with Barbara and other members of the Shoalhaven Caravan Club. Another good thing was that his death was sudden, and he did not suffer from a lingering, painful deterioration that would have been humiliating for him and difficult for those around him. And at over 80 years of age, he had had a good innings ... We are planning a trip to Europe in June 2007 to do a walk around Mont Blanc in France / Italy and a walk in Switzerland as well. Apart from that, we plan to finish off Karen's trigs, continue working, and do our usual road cycling, kayaking, mountain-biking, bushwalking and maybe do some more rogaines as well (Karen is not quite sure that they are exactly her cup of tea) - so we basically hope to maintain the status quo. Karen and I hope that 2006 was a good year for everyone, and that 2007 will be even better ...