June 28th 2021

Days km: 20.2km
Total km: 381.4km

My shins were sore this morning, but felt better after some aspirin. In fact lets just assume my shins are sore all the time unless I say otherwise. I am sick of typing ‘shins’.

I normally wake pretty early but I was in no rush today it was “only” 20km. Joel was already packed and heading out. I got up quietly, not wanting to wake Meg and hobbled quietly around camp for a good long while before I realised she was already long gone. I had heard nothing, so she must have moved like a ninja. She and Joel were probably going for a double today. I did heave a sigh at that. I would love to smash out a double, but my sh…the front part of the bottom of my legs would not allow it.

The sun was out this morning so I went to put on my sunglasses only to have them fall straight off my face. I had somehow snapped one of the arms in the middle of the night without noticing. Ah well, that was the third thing then, phone, stove and now sunglasses. Nothing else was allowed to break. It’s the rules.

It was, again, a nice walk, much nicer than what I encountered in the Dwellingup to Collie section. By nice, I mean the track was varied with forest trail, lakeside trail, train tracks and farm roads. No brutal ascents or descents either, so…nice. I also came across a lot of roos today. I love how the smaller ones bounce away but the bigger ones just chew their food, with their chest out, giving you the “come at me, bro!” eye.

At lunch I stopped at the Mumby pub, sadly it was closed Mondays and Tuesdays so I just got to sit out on the seats out front whilst I ate my own food. But the seats were cushioned, so I had that going for me. A couple of northbounders turned up just as I was prepping to leave. They were doing a couple of days on the Bibb in preparation for a thru-hike in September and were covering crazy distances each day. One of them looked familiar and I realised I had seen his YouTube videos. So there you go, that’s two YouTuber’s I’ve met on the trail so far. Check out Cam Bostock, he makes some nice hiking vids and is on the Bibb right now (well at least he was as at September 17 2021).

There are a couple of big hills on farm roads not far from the pub so I was grateful I had not had a big fried delicious lunch with a few ciders as I would probably have thrown up at the top. At least that’s what I told myself to make up for the fact I wasn’t able to have a big delicious fried lunch with a few ciders…I reached Noggerup with plenty of light left and was half tempted to push on to the next campsite, but it was another 20km so I swallowed my impatience and set up camp.

My you-know-what’s felt a lot better today, so fingers crossed for the rest of the trip.

Sometime after 7pm, I was in bed trying to decide which movie to watch when the tell-tale glint of a headlamp shimmered through the trees. This was Max Sharkey, a super fast hiker aiming to finish the Bibb in 20 odd days. He’s a real nice dude and we chatted amiably for a good few hours. He won the “person with the coolest job on the trail” award, being a stuntman working on some Marvel movies. I’m not sure anyone will top that. He had just finished working on “Thor: Love and Thunder” so he had some cool stories. He asked me about my job and even acted interested when I told him. As I said, nice dude.

The Bibb is not his first rodeo having completed the PCT in 2018 and he showed me some video of the sketchy river crossings he had done on that track. Sketchy with a capital S…and it looked amazing.

As we were chatting in the dark, there was a loud pop and my sleeping pad suddenly had an extra pillow. One of the baffles had blown. Max joked about it being an ultralight pillow but then added “yeah, more of them are going to blow”.

Well ain’t that just great.

But wait, this is the fourth thing to break! The rules have been broken! The universe it out of whack! Is nothing sacred! Will everything break?

Those were the thoughts that raced through my head into the wee small hours until I eventually drifted off to sleep. Then my pad popped another baffle as if to say “yeah, we are going add some broken sleep to that list, mate.”