Yesterday's walk

Yesterday morning was bloody freezing with an arctic wind and a severe weather warning ... so we went for a walk. Yay for us! Not a long one, about 5km and not too steep or too far from home. We walked through a frost hollow - an open space formed because the temperatures drop too cold for trees, which we could well believe - and then through a variety of native forests, which is even less interesting than it sounds. But it was all fresh air.



I said "look like you're in a frost hollow!" which perhaps got the reaction it deserved.



At the snack break I said "look like you're in a remnant yellow box woodland!" which was even less inspiring.



The last part of the walk was through a cork oak plantation that the early Canberrans thought would be a good idea to plant back in about 1917. Cork oaks take decades to mature to a point where you can harvest the cork, and nobody really anticipated the advance of the screw cap. Never mind, the cork apparently does get harvested and sold, and now it's all part of the new arboretum. You can see where the trunk has been stripped and is slowly re-growing.

It was strangely fascinating because I never think of cork as tree bark, even though my head knows that's what it is. And it was very pleasant to walk in. The boys thought the best bit of the walk was the road underpass because if you shouted REALLY loudly it echoed for full five minutes. Boys.