This run was positively orgasmic if you’re a train spotter. The Punch-Ups set a gorgeous run through some of Melbourne’s loveliest residential streets and suburban gardens. We trailed past hideously expensive but beautiful Kew homes and gardens till we got to the old Outer Circle rail trail which is now a bike path. In the 1880s the Outer Circle Railway was built from Fairfield to Oakleigh to circumvent lots of little private railways which dotted Melbourne’s suburbia and which made the rail system incredibly inefficient unlike today’s very efficient Metro rail system. Ahem. The line only operated for a few years before the ‘Deepdene Dasher’ was replaced by a bus service.
At the site of the old Shenley Railway Station we had lots of time to cogitate the fate of the phantom rail line because we got lost. Cooch had a map which gave us all confidence. After all he’s an engineer, a GM and he’s a man, so naturally he can read maps. NOT. Turns out he can’t read maps so he thought “How can I make this better? I Know, I’ll ask the walkers if they’ve seen runners’ arrows”. In the way that chocolate teapots or ashtrays on motor bikes are really useful, well that’s how useful the walkers were. After about 15 minutes someone spotted an arrow and we were off.
Punch served up heaps of delicious fruity punch at the much needed drink stop. It was on-home to some tasty rissoles with lashings of potato salad.
Run ReportPrickly Bush – good run with grouse houses, went through some lovely parks including Deepdene plus a few alleys. Pack stayed together except for Big Ears. Walkers were most unhelpful, deliberately giving the runners a bum steer arrow-direction-wise. 695/700.
Food Report
Sweaty Box – Kokup’s special rissoles, potato salad washed down with Tim Tams, not forgetting E&B’s left over sausages.
Returnees
Pegmatite, Back Beard
Special Runs
LubeOil 254, Cut Loose 191, Punch 262, Bondi 7, Cheesecake 555.
Charges
Sergeant – Bondi
- Hares – Kokup and Punch)
- Back Beard for not signing the book and for being a lazy bastard – there were 80 on-backs but he only did seven of them.)
- Cooch because Back Beard wanted a Lakeside t-shirt and Cooch gave him a mud-encrusted old Cooch shirt.)
- LubeOil for being helpful at the drink stop.)
- LuBangOz for not being lured into a car with Punch and LuBangOil when LuBangOil offered him sweets.)
- Astro had a map, he could have short-cutted and made it short and quick but he made it long and hard.)
- Prince and Bondi for running through checks.)
- Sweaty Box for leaving her pants at Prickly Bush’s house.)
- Cheesecake for going down on the run.)
- Prickly Bush looked for a big root and fell for it.)
- Big Ears for seeing Fiddler on the Roof (involved some reference to Archbishop George Pell?))
- Cut Loose for boiling and peeling 8 eggs for potato salad.)
- Kokup for making Astro travel in the tram with smelly boiled eggs.)
- Pointy for being a poser with a Porsche because his BMW is in the repair shop.)
- Swingers and Pegmatite who went on holiday to Wollongong but only Swingers went to hash so Pegmatite is a slacker. (Why Wollongong? New York, Honolulu, Monte Carlo – but Wollongong?)