This site is going live roughly 6 months late. While its inspiration was found during a week away in September 2019 in Halls Gap the plan was to bring it all together around March 2020. As with most things 2020, the year had other ideas.

Now a bit of background information: we're located near Melbourne, Australia. A place recognised as having endured some of the toughest Coronavirus lockdown restrictions in the world.

This makes it incredibly difficult to maintain a blog dedicated to "getting out", when we can only leave our houses for short periods of time, limited reasons, with a curfew and for many months couldn't travel beyond 5kms from our homes. Even now as restrictions ease those of us considered to be "metropolitan" can't travel into regional Victoria.

So during lockdown we needed to get creative. We started out by mapping out walks around and around our local suburb, varying the walk to go in different directions and see different things. Eventually however, the kids' interest started to run low.

We don't have our own dog so one thing that worked really well was to occasionally borrow our neighbour's dog.

The problem with this of course is it's not sustainable to keep borrowing someone else's dog. At the same time, we started to vary our activities around the home and realised that night time holds a special interest for our kids. Cue camp-outs in the cubby house and in pleasant nights roasting marshmallows on our fire pit.

As restrictions eased Melbourne's curfue changed from 8:00PM to 9:00PM. This changed everything. Suddenly we could give the kids a torch (or as we have changed it up, a headlamp) and wander out. We've managed to consistently get 6km walks out of the kids which I feel isn't bad when we're walking the same route consistently and not incentivising them to walk further. As restrictions are continuing to ease we're hopeful that we can get out further and hopefully back to regional areas. Until then we will have the night.