Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Original plan for today was to fly to Brisbane, pick up a car in town and head to Warwick via a somewhat roundabout route (Beaudesert, Mount Lindesay, Queen Mary Falls, Killarney), going for a swim on the way. I'd initially picked out Acacia Ridge for this but had an early navigation fail, not seeing the way onto Ipswich Road from the freeway (I gather I should have taken the exit for Stanley Street and Vulture Street, two names which will be very familiar to cricket fans), and ended up going through Sunnybank - not such a bad route to get to Beaudesert Road but came out well past Acacia Ridge. No problem, I thought, should be easy to find a pool in a small town somewhere - but all of them had already closed for the winter (I wonder what they'd think of Fitzroy in July), and I arrived in Warwick, went into the shops to get something - and saw that the headline story in the Warwick paper (where there is evidently a bit of a shortage of news) was that the Warwick pool is closed for two weeks for maintenance. As those of you will know me will know, once I've set my mind on a session it takes a fair bit to deter me from it, so I ended up using the only option available to me - the motel pool. 140 laps of this was a bit dizzying, and in fading light and with no markings on the bottom I misjudged a non-trivial number of the 139 turns, but it did seem to loosen me up a bit after the travels.

As for the journey there, as I expected, this went through some nice country once beyond Beaudesert, although it also featured some of the least attractive suburbs in Australia which the rest of you will get to enjoy on the way to next Sunday's event (the commercial centre of Browns Plains was a particular lowlight), as well as the worst bitumen road I've seen in Australia (and probably the worst anywhere since the Kazakhstan trip), west of Woodenbong (which is probably aptly-named as I suspect a fair amount of dope is grown in those parts). It perhaps sums up the failings of the political system because the road is in NSW but most of its use is by people going from one bit of Queensland to another, plus the only settlement of any size on the NSW side isn't in the shire that most of the road is.

Had some orienteering encounters at Queen Mary Falls, with the Casanova party (which was sort of planned) and Janet Morris and Barry Hanlon (which wasn't).

And the Warwick shops featured an ad for the local criminal lawyer, Phil Crook. It's been a good week for that sort of thing as a couple of days ago I heard some media quotes from Nicola Rivers, spokesperson for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.