Nearly 14 weeks ago, the Premier of NSW announced that we would be under two weeks of stay at home orders due to rising numbers of cases of the delta strain of Covid-19 as you can guess that 14 days has stretched out to 14 weeks and counting.

For the first few weeks, we held our breaths and waited to be able to resume our near-normal lives, but as the weeks rolled into each other. The hope of any travel was dashed. In the course of this time, we had cancelled a weekend away with friends, stopped working on our still postponed trip to South Australia and gave up hope of me jumping out of a plane over fox Glacier in New Zealand to celebrate turning fifty. Then Phil and I made a decision that has not only given us content and days out, but it has awoken us to the hidden beautiful places so close to our home.

With no hope of travel or new places to explore with camera in hand, we decided to take our youtube community on a local bush walk with us. This walk is something we have and will continue to do as we get fit.

With this one video and no hope of freedom coming anytime soon, we decided to explore the majestic Blue Mountains area, our home.

I am slightly ashamed to admit that we have not been very good at exploring in the eight years we have lived here, but this lockdown has proved the perfect push we needed.

Over the past few weeks, we have picked places close by, and we have never visited or at least it has been a while. We can exercise and picnic in our local government area, so we have selected different places to see each week and take our community along with us.

What have we discovered?

The blue mountains are spectacular, with open vistas from lookouts overlooking the valley, waterfalls staking their claim on a piece of a cliff or cascading over jagged rocks on its way to the valley floor way below. We can not forget awesome walks through rugged bush tracks or cooling cold climate rainforests; all of these God-created masterpieces make the perfect backdrops for picnic areas, lookouts, paragliding, and just taking a deep breath.

A highlight for me has been looking for the native flowers as they come out. So many of the natives are so small and if by themselves, are hard to find.

Now we are not fit, we use hiking sticks on most walks, but we are so thankful for being able to take this time to visit these majestic sights, to be reminded of the majesty that is all around us and get a little fitter as we push our bodies to do things we have not done for a very long time :) The Blue Mountains is a popular day trip from Sydney or a great weekend getaway, and as we explore, we hope to give people other ideas of places to visit in the area once this lockdown has ended.

We know that a time coming when we will be able to load up the car and head to new places, visit family and friends, but for now, we are making the most of enjoying our blue mountains backyard.

If you would like to see where we have been, check out the links below.