Karawatha Forest Park

It’s been a big week! Leila and my babies have gone to Argentina, I’m inching closer to the app launch deadline at work, and we’re moving house. A lot of big things to be happening at the same time. I dropped Leila and the girls to the airport on Monday morning, I’m glad they’ll be spending a month in Argentina because it’s going to be a wonderful time for them with family. All my parent friends have made comments to me about how lucky and “free” I’m going to be, and yes there’s certainly an element of that (there’ll be a couple more blog posts in the coming weeks), but I love having the girls around and don’t feel I need space from them at the moment. However, they’re not my property and I’m glad they’ll be spending time with family that love them and also connecting with their latin roots. While they’re gone though, I have the mission of moving house for us. The last few weeks, Leila has made a start at packing, but it’s been like holding back the ocean with a broom: packing with two energetic and mobile kids just doesn’t work. Poor Leila, I know she was trying her best and she still got some stuff packed, but I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me over the next week. My current schedule has been work, pack, sleep, repeat, and I’ve got a very busy weekend ahead of me: finalising the packing, touching up some of the walls and doing the gardening. Which is why I needed so badly to get outside this afternoon.

Someone else who’s also home alone at the moment is Robyn! Harry has just headed back to the US for another tour after only recently getting back from a tour that included playing at Coachella: epic!! So we decided to go for wander and have a catch up, cos it’d certainly been a while. As ever, I wanted to go somewhere I hadn’t been before, so I scrolled Google maps and came across Karawatha Forest Park. It is the latest pocket of bushland to join a growing list of places I’d never been to or even heard of. I can’t believe how many places like this I’ve come across since moving back to Brisbane! I lived in this city for 11 years and missed out on visiting any of these places, I guess I was always exploring further afield. Well it turns out Karawatha is lovely, it’s got a Discovery Centre (that we didn’t go inside), a bunch of play areas for kids, BBQs and a big network of bush tracks, it’d be a great spot to spend a day.

The bushwalking trails are more extensive that I was lead to believe by the Brisbane City Council website, which says the trails are only as long as a couple of kms. But once we were in the bushland there were signs of trails 11km long. So I don’t know if those signs were missing decimal points or whether the council is just listing sections of bigger trails, but the place is essentially a web of trails that’s perfect for just wandering and seeing where you end up. Quite similar to Bayview Conservation Park in that regard I’d say.

The terrain varies more than I thought it would, I was just expecting scrub throughout, but the start of our walk was very gravelly and headed up to some nice rock formations with views as far as the city. Yes, I know that picture shows me wearing Crocs and I know the name of this blog, forgive me that I have sinned! Continuing the trail then eventually took us to a paperbark forest with long grasses and low ferns. We got to pass along some wooden boardwalks and across a couple of bridges and saw plenty of wallabies. I didn’t note too many birds, that’s not to say there weren’t many, but more so that Robyn and I were nattering the whole time. It was so lovely to see her again and have a catch up, I’d finished my Ph.D. and changed jobs since I saw her earlier in the year, so there was plenty to talk about.

That’s all to note for now, which means I better get back to packing! Ooh and I’m planning an overnight hike with Natalie in a couple of weeks and am very excited for that!