Day 26: Crystal Brook to Hiskeys Hut 19.72km

It was lovely to sleep in a bed with an electric blanket. The night didn't get as cold as I thought it might and I had to turn the blankets down. Blankets you say . Well I had a double. When you spend night after night arranging yourself onto a sleeping mat no wider than your shoulders the sheer luxury of spreading out is exquisite. Look out Belinda when I get home. 

Woke up early as usual and I believe I was the only one upstairs so I made a coffee and packed the pack waiting for 7 o'clock and the bakery to open. I would have preferred eggs on toast but that cafe didn't open till 10am. 

I ended up getting a curry pie for breakfast. Not the best idea as it repeated all day as I walked. Left Crystal Brook by about 7.40am and today was just a road and paddock walk to get across from the Southern Flinders to the Northern Mt Lofty Ranges which I will then follow down past Adelaide. 

There is a good thing about fairly flat road walking and that is the mind can wander about. 

Today I caught sight of my shadow and pondered the engineering that has gone into developing us. When you think about it we stand tall with a lot of weight above our waist balancing, in my case on size 10.5 feet. The skeletal and muscle structure that gives us stability to walk and run is quite fascinating. The shadow I was looking at had my pack hanging of the back and I was pondering the adjustments my body is making so I can walk. This leads onto thinking about our body and how it responds to stimulus and the adjustments it makes as we ask it to do various things. 

I can of course see some changes as the weeks go on. One of them was losing a fair bit of belly fat that helped keep my pack up. I have lost a bit and now the pack slides down and I don't think it will get better till I lose a bit more fat and get an actual waist. Then there is the thought of what happens to the body when we go to space. Our muscles atrophy and we lose bone density through lack of stimulus. 

So then if we are built really well for the Earth and not so well for space then what will we have to do to go out and play in the cosmos. 

Given that relativity holds true if we want to explore beyond our backyard we can't as we are today. Will the explorers of the future be quite alien to us. How do you ride a light wave. Hmmm 

Then I reached Hiskeys Hut. Its on a bare hill that the friends of the Heysen have planted trees on so in the future it will be a little protected. The last people living here were 3 adults and 6 children. Its no bigger than my lounge dining and kitchen so they must have spent a lot of time outside. I knocked some deadwood of a tree down the gully and may light a fire tonight.