Back in 2021 I started a side project, setting up a 4x4 to get off-road with the kids.It first made an appearance on this site here. Then again it featured in my last post of 2021 when I injured my leg. That kicked off an unfortunately long time between posts.

But we're back. And we've been in the mud.

This post starts in January 2022. My mate's brother has been busy building up a 4x4. My brother has been getting off-road. I've got my car to the point where I'm ready to get off-road. We're sitting around enjoying the calm before we return to work in the new year and an idea is born. What if we get the dads together, and take the kids off-road?

February

We picked a date in March, sent a hold this date message out to all who are interested and started the process of scouting a location. Come February and we've decided on Cobaw state forest, got three vehicles together and decided to go scouting before the kids joined us.

We spent a day scouting and mapping out a rough route for when we came back with the kids. We were on the lookout for tracks that led nowhere, tracks that would be too rough with kids tagging along, and downed trees.

We found some suitably fun sections of track and called it a day.

March

March 19th arrived. The dads got up early and packed kids, snacks and drinks into the cars. We arrived at Cobaw with 6 kids and 6 vehicles.

On the day we found a few sections of washed out track:

A couple of steep sections to climb:

Did a little bit of track maintenance:

And even managed to find a little bit of water to splash about in, even though it was relatively dry:

As is mandatory with kids in tow, we wrapped it all up with toaster marshmallows.

This is just a whirlwind summary of what we got up to, because that's what it was. A short half day, lots of little snippets of adventure. All trying to keep pace with the attention span of young children, and a few big kids with 4x4s too.