The Larapinta Trail, 2023 |
 Day 1 (Friday, 28 April 2023) – The Ormiston Pound Walk: … where the plans for the next six days were outlined to us by our two guides, Ella Du Ve (who’s kneeling in the dry riverbed) and Michael Smigielski (wearing the trektours Australia t-shirt). We also introduced ourselves. There were a total of eight clients on the trip. Going from left to right round the group, the other seven were Heather Roberts from Wellington (who’s holding a light blue water bottle), Bob Slyker (with the binoculars), Peggy Wall (with the pink water bottle), Libby Gilkes (from Sydney), Melissa Laird (from Melbourne), Deb Holder (a friend of Melissa’s and also from Melbourne), and Stephen Kulmar (who’s Libby Gilkes’ husband and also from Sydney). I first met Peggy Wall in 1962 when I was a foreign exchange student in Ohio. She and Bob Slyker live near San Francisco, and this was the fourth long-distance walk that Heather and I have done with them. The previous three were on Spain’s Camino de Santiago (i.e., the Camino Frances or French Way) in 2010; along the Offa’s Dyke Path that straddles the England/Wales border in 2015; and from Porto to Santiago de Compostela in 2017. |