If you’ve seen two walkers getting around town with big backpacks lately (that’s us!) I promise we’re not running away from home.
Well not permanently, anyway.
Zac and I have again become those strange people walking through Beaudesert with the big packs, but this time we are training for a walk of an entirely different kind.
It’s not the first time we’ve been for a multi-day walk, carrying our food, shelter and clothes on our backs.
Our trusty old patched up bags have seen us through many long walks, from overnighters on the Border Track and Mt Barney to six weeks in Spain on the Camino de Santiago.
With these packs we’ve done hut walks through Tasmania, like the Overland Track and Three Capes Track, and carried all we needed to camp our way through the Great Ocean Walk in Victoria.
But for this walk, Zac has swapped his old pack for a great big bag to hold our baby Rosie.
Our young adventurer loves being up at our height, taking in all the sights of Beaudesert from her comfy position on Zac’s back and I personally think there’s nothing cuter than a happy baby in a bag.
If she loves country suburbia this much, imagine how much she’s going to love the Tasmanian wilderness.
At the end of June, just after our baby turns one, we are going to revisit the Three Capes Track as a family. It is a four-day, three-night walk along stunning coastline, staying in Parks Tasmania shelter huts along the way.
Of all the multi-day walks we’ve done; it is the gentlest. Plus, that part of Tasmania doesn’t snow, and minimum temperatures are similar to that of a Beaudesert winter.
Planning logistics for a multi-day walk with a baby is an adventure all of its own.
When you walk in the wilderness, you have to carry all your rubbish out with you (and rightly so). That includes used nappies. Just let that stinky (and heavy) fact sink in!
The big orange waterproof bag you can see hanging off Zac’s pack contains four days of used nappies on a recent training hike in Lamington National Park, so we have worked out a way to manage the nappy situation.
Also, there isn’t space in that big baby pack for Zac to carry much more than Rosie (and her nappies). So, my pack will be the heaviest it’s been, carrying all our food for four days and our warmest sleeping bags as well as my own personal gear.
So why are we doing it?
It might seem crazy, but we genuinely love it and thankfully so does our girl.
In some ways, it feels like we’ve been training for this walk for a decade.
We’ve gradually acquired gear to keep us warm and dry and developed skills and experience to responsibly walk in the wilderness for days on end.
We’ve found wonderful second-hand baby hiking gear to keep our girl warm and dry, too.
Rosie has been for a walk for us every morning since she was three days old, so you could say she’s been training all her life to be the baby in the bag.
