The 2007 Xmas Letter of Brett and Karen

Merry Xmas from Brett and Karen,

2007 was a fairly quiet year for Karen and me, especially when compared to the momentous events of last year. For those of you who may have forgotten, click here for a review of our 2006. Unlike last year, we both survived 2007 without any major injuries, although the aches and pains that come with age are starting to take their toll.

Karen seems destined to follow in her mother's footsteps, with her knees showing signs of wear and tear, especially when walking downhill. She is still swimming and cycling regularly, but her bushwalking is now more circumspect, taking special notice of the numbers of metres of ascent and descent.

With the exception of my left shoulder which works fine but will always remain separated unless I choose to have surgery, the rest of my body has recovered completely from the mountain bike crash of 2006. I am even back playing golf again, with my handicap currently hovering around 11. I hope to get back down to a single figure handicap sometime in the new year.

Karen's trig quest, begun last year, to visit and photograph every trig station in the Shoalhaven shire, was successfully completed at Easter, with the bagging of Ettrema trig after a three day, full pack hike. The last few trigs were very remote, requiring long and difficult walks.

Many of the trigs were reached on walks with our walking club, the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers (www.shoalhavenbushwalkers.org.au) who decided that Karen's success should be publicised. In my role as club publicity officer, I wrote an article about the quest and submitted it to Outdoor Magazine, which published the article in its September/October edition. Scanned images of the article can be found via the following links - pages 1 and 2, pages 3 and 4, and pages 5 and 6.

The article also appeared in the NSW Surveyor's Journal, and a cut down version of it later appeared in a special publication called Shoalhaven Unlimited which is produced by the South Coast Register, our local paper. A scan of the latter can be found here.

(Click the thumbnails below to view a larger image)

However, the major highlight of our year was a trip to Europe to walk in the Alps during June and July. Together with friends Gill and John Souter, and later their nephew Jeremy, we spent five weeks walking three major long distance routes - the Tour of Mt Blanc where we walked from Switzerland to Italy and then into France before completing the circuit back into Switzerland; the High Route from Chamonix in France to Zermatt in Switzerland, finishing in the shadows of the Matterhorn; and the Alpine Passes Route, which goes through Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen and passes the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau.

The weather in Switzerland varied from hot, sunny days with temperatures over 30°C, to snow-blown blizzards and temperatures below zero. The latter made for some very exciting walking, with a couple of passes at altitudes close to 3000 metres being crossed with limited visibility, and the track disappearing under the snow!

During the 33 days of walking in the Alps we averaged 930 metres of ascents and descents every day, with a total altitude gain and loss of about 31,000 metres - equivalent to climbing Mount Everest more than four times! When combined with the hard bushwalking of the trig quest, it is no wonder Karen's knees were shot by the time she arrived back in Australia!

(Click thumbnails for larger images)

Workwise, Karen still does her four days a week with Bosco Accounting, mainly working on tax returns and superannuation funds. She has been at Bosco longer than any other job she has had. She hopes to be able to take more time off during quiet periods over the next few years so that we can go travelling around Australia and tick off all the birds we have not seen as yet. This would mean trips to Cape York and through the central deserts, probably requiring a 4WD vehicle, so this year we sold our old Ford Station Wagon and bought a brand new Nissan X-Trail.

Now the only spanner in the works is my website design business - www.brettdavis.com.au, which continues to grow. When I started it, I thought that a website a week would bring me in some nice pocket money, but I had not foreseen that maintenance on websites that I would design would quickly occupy a major proportion of my time, and income. It is now almost a full time job!

We are both still very active members of the Shoalhaven Bushwalkers. Karen is the weekend walks coordinator and serves on the committee. This year I managed to relinquish my editorship of the club newsletter to Gill Souter (who walked with us in Switzerland). Gill has published books on walking in Europe, so is more than qualified for the task. I am still the webmaster for the club, as well as archivist (I collect things for posterity) and publicity officer (where my main task is to avoid publicity as we have too many members as it is - almost 200 at last count). And at this years AGM, I also happened to be elected President of the club as well ...

The house and gardens are all going fine, especially the latter. We have been steadily adding plants to the garden, mostly natives, and have been successful in attracting lots of native birds, especially small ones. Karen had a baby thornbill land on her during its first flight early in December - it probably thought she was a tree! We also have a juvenile male satin bowerbird building a bower in our back yard. Every few days the boss male bowerbird shows up and knocks the bower down, but the youngster perseveres!

We also had a blue-tongue lizard living under our front porch for most of the spring. It was really nice to see her (Lizzie) come out for a sun-bake most days. And we still get kangaroos in both yards occasionally as well! All part of our growing "family".

Anyway, that's about it for our news. Karen and I hope that 2007 was a good year for everyone, and that 2008 will be even better ...

Happy New Year,
Brett and Karen