Life in the big city

Midnight and it's time to play with long exposures.
Dry cave, roaring fire, hard climbs, no mosquitos,
what more could a man want??

Well, I had a good time at Bundaleer, camping under a huge overhang where we tried some ridiculously steep routes (45-50 degree overhangs) climbing literally over the top of our tents. I was supprised to find that I can actually crank pretty hard routes on such outrageous angles and monkeying around on them was quite a lot of fun. Sadly both routes I tried had a big dynamic lunge move at some point that I couldn't catch, on the third day of climbing stupid angles I woke up with a back so shafted I could barely walk!

I spent a day seeing the Great Ocean Road, got lots of sea stack photos but they are pretty ordinary, still was fun to do something touristy for a change. I have been living in Melbourne with my girlfriend Billie and trying to find a job (between getting sidetracked by facebook, forums, blogs, etc.). I had fun spending christmas day with lots of relatives in Melbourne and spent new year with a friend of Billies in the country where the temperature hit 40C and we met the new year in an outdoor pool under the stars. I also drove a combine harvester for a little bit which is remarkably good fun (apparently though, that wears off after a month of driving it 18 hours a day every day during harvest).

The crux on Aftermath turned out to be
hanging on long enough to clip the bolt.

In climbing news, I went to Werribee Gorge for a day and was back at Arapliles for a few days also. The weather was a bit too hot to get anything spectacular done at Arapiles but I managed my first 24 onsite (sport though) at Werribee - but honestly it was pretty soft for the grade - and I did a few other bolted lines, all of which were on very nice rock, it was great to find that there is such quality climbing available close to Melbourne as well. While I'm talking about climbing and I can include pictures again, I thought I might add one of me trying Aftermath (24) quite a while ago.

Ok, enough for now, I have to go find a job and get a climbing shop to return my DMM brass offsets (DMM has a rather different opinion of how these items should be used and how long they should last than I do, it turns out.)