Monday the 2nd of November

was the day before Melbourne Cup day. As usual I took the day off to make a 4 day weekend. Now if this was normal circumstances this would mean spending the weekend somewhere or just making a series of "days out" out of the long weekend. However, as we've all heard far too often we are living in "unprecedented times". So this 2nd of November 2020, Melbourne still has the "ring of steel" in place. Legally we can't visit regional Victoria so we have opted to do the next best thing > take full advantage of the green spaces we have at our disposal and the fact I have enough time to do so.

Today's goal was simple, take what's a basic activity (pick my son up from kinder) and turn it into an adventure. What we ended up with was a 8km trek (4km for my son who we picked up at the half way point) through our local green spaces.

Water & snacks in my backpack. Hats and (thanks to 2020) masks on. We're ready to go.

Frankly there's not too much to say about the walk other than to hopefully inspire others.

We started out on concrete.

But after a little while we had shifted to a soft path which offered some shade and a really beautiful place to walk. If I could have I would have stayed here on loop for an hour.

At the 4km mark we had returned to civilisation to pick my son up from kinder and venture back home. This afforded us the opportunity to slow things down a bit and take in more of our surrounds. The kids were particularly interested in the insects and birds around us once we started paying greater attention to them.

I've previously addressed the challenges of maintaining an outdoor lifestyle in the age of Coronavirus. As we see more evidence of the mental toll of the pandemic and associated lock-down measures I think it's important to find an escape and there's overwhelming evidence that green spaces are particularly beneficial for mental health. Even if getting outdoors wasn't something you bothered to do pre-covid maybe now is possibly the best time to pick it up as new habit, and it may just be a habbit that sticks with you after we have a vaccine and we put this chapter of history behind us.