Strava Art has taken off during lockdown – orienteers are planning routes that outline, well, anything you like really.  It got a huge boost when Fredo and Craig, up in Bendigo, created a map of the world during a 25 km run, as part of an online Easter Challenge (check it out here).

Since then everyone’s been doing kangaroos, bunnies, maps of Australia – whatever takes their fancy.  Ted decided to give it a go, and he and Margi created their own aeroplanes. They had so much fun that they decided to do it again, but this time they invited more of us to “fly” on “Eppalock East Airlines”.  We picked a gloriously clear sunny day, and headed to everyone’s favourite forest at Eppalock (not too steep, not too flat, not too thick … just right).  Ted designed plane outlines of different distances and scales, to suit our varied abilities and preferences.  Ilze and I got a 3km one. Pete and Margi tackled a 4km version.  Ian and Jim did the 5km outline, while Ted and Warwick took on an 8km course.

Starting from the same track junction, the idea was to start with the nose and cockpit, make your way down the fuselage to a wing, trace around the engines, continue around the tail, then back along the other side and wing, before finishing back at the nose.  With no controls or tags to find, it was an exercise in concentration, compass bearing, and contouring, picking the right places to make turns and keep as close to the shape as possible.  We had 90 minutes to complete our mission, and it took 75-80 minutes for most of us – taking a slower pace than normal.  It was like doing a course with about 40 controls, only with no controls!

Ilze and I didnt have a lot of features to go by – our plane didnt cross any tracks or notable features other than some lines of rock. So we had to be really careful to follow subtle contour features and accurate bearings.  The top half and tail of our plane worked out quite well, but we lost it on the second wing and return to the finish, as the terrain was so vague.  So our plane’s belly was very fat, and our final shape was more seagull than jet.  Pete made a stingray, while the others all did pretty respectable aircraft, with the odd deviation here and there.

It was just wonderful to have a day trip, get out of the house for an extended period, meet up with people we havent seen for weeks, and spend a few hours out in superb forest. The day ended way too quickly.

Meanwhile we’ve kept running every few days, and I’ve now clocked up 25 Maplink runs since the end of March.  We’re starting back at streetO on 1 June, in a cut down fashion to accommodate groups of no more than 20, and lots of precautions. Setting all of that up has consumed my time in the past week, but the takeup has been very enthusiastic (despite a dire weather forecast for the first night).  Some sort of normal is slowly returning to our lives.