Watching Other People Work (Or Play, As The Case May Be)

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We visited Onkaparinga Gorge, taking a picnic lunch out to the Punchbowl Lookout with a grand view down to the swimming holes in the bottom of the gorge. Children's voices echoed off the rock walls and we had occasional glimpses of teeny tiny people swimming in what I can only imagine was really cold water.


I bet that water is cold.
 

Back at the car park we followed the climbers' track to the part of the cliffs allocated to climbers, most of the gorge being too crumbly for climbers to go up and down willy-nilly. There was even a steep set of steps to allow climbers to eschew having to climb both ways if they didn't want to do so. The steps gave a great view over another part of the gorge and as a bonus we got to watch someone else doing the hard and scary work of climbing 

 

 
He got to the top safely.


I like watching other people work. Or climb, as the case may be.

In the spirit of watching other people do strenuous things, the very next day we went to watch a whole heap of very motivated people run a marathon/half marathon/10k/5k run. It helped that they ran along the rail trail right past Oxenberry, a cellar door cum cafe for which we had a discount voucher.
 

 
We walked along part of the running route to get there, past some marshals who put extraordinary amounts of vim and vigor into their marshaling. We even took the dog with us, torturing him by giving him plain water while we had yummy snacks and watched runners in various stages of exhaustion make their way past a sunlit backdrop of vineyards.
 


By the time I'd watched all the runners go past and practiced lifting my cup of tea up and down half a dozen times I was quite exhausted and it was time to go home.  The dog, bless his little furry paws, was exhausted too and in quite a sulk due to the whole water/no food situation.  I took him home and gave him a cupful of dry doggie biscuits for which, being a dog, he was ridiculously grateful.



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