Training for this week was out at Daisy Hill for a change of scenery from the Coot-tha sessions of the past few weeks. As Shane was in Mackay for wedding, and Wayne was still away on the work trip the group was smaller: just Brock; his cousin, Zach (sorry - don't know the spelling); and myself.
We set out from the Ford Rd carpark around 12.45pm, a little later than our planned departure time of 12.30. Random wanderings took us to a quarry (where we stopped to observe a couple of guys jumping off a cliff and into the dam/lake/pond - not a particularly bright idea). Rather than walking with any particular plan, we just followed the trail we were on until we came to a crossroad which identified where in the reserve we actually were. (I know we've managed to guess our way around parts of Mt Coot-tha, but at least all the signs out there have trail names attached to them - out at Daisy Hill there are a few arrows with no additional signs and plenty of side trails making it difficult to be certain where on the map we were located).
We ended up walking most of the major trails and a few offshoots: Stringybark Trail, Buhot Creek Circuit, and Plunkett Malee Circuit (this was located near the cars so we wandered through this several times).
A little before 3pm we found ourselves back near the carparks so decided to head for the neighbouring Venman reserve (and the imaginatively named Venman Circuit). We were walking against the unlabelled arrows for most of the way, having opted to follow the fenceline from the point where Venman meets Daisy Hill, and at some point (presumably close to the Venman carpark) we again "followed" an arrow backwards which worked fine for a while, but failed us at a later crossroad when the next arrow once again pointed to the carpark in a different direction. Figuring that the trail we were on had to lead somewhere, we kept walking. Around a kilometre later we found ourselves following a fenceline south, and seeing as it was around 70 minutes before sunset (and only I had a torch) we re-evaluated our original plan of finding our way back north and instead continued south to meet up with Leo Lindo Drive and suburban Daisy Hill (which later meets up with a different corner of Daisy Hill Forest).
After reaching and following the road for a couple of kilometres, we decided to jog a little way to stretch out some lethargic muscles - a plan which worked well for around 2 kilometres until I stopped to walk rather than aggravate my right knee (which had held up excellently all afternoon). We then proceeded to walk our way back past the quarry we'd seen earlier and landed back at the carpark a couple of minutes after 5pm.
Given that not all the trails we took are marked on the map, it's hard to get a good estimate on the distance travelled, but it was around 24 kilometres in 4 hours 20 min.
