It's 212!

I (with help from Maggie Marriott) have figured it out

100,000 - 62,000 - ?

and 113 to be quite accurate. 

But the question mark is for the number of Facebook likes which I couldn't figure out how to get off my Facebook page for this blog. This is despite asking Davo who often drives me in the wheelchair taxi and is an expert in this field. Anyone that can unlock this secret is welcome to leave a comment, which may be anonymous, to this post.

Keeping on keeping on

i'll be quite frank with you dear reader by saying that I want to reach 100,000 page views before I die which could be quite soon and say, as well, that it is hard to think of a picture to go with that.

Since I am at 99,945 page views this post should do the trick regardless of anything.

A foothold in New Zealand

For a long time I have been dreaming of the TrailRider being adopted by the New Zealand Department of Conservation in the way that it has been been adopted by Parks Victoria and finally I have glimpsed the first instance of that coming to pass.

A PhD thesis which, in actual fact, speaks of design for the disabled shows a tantalising glimpse of a TrailRider being used on a beach in New Zealand and that is what I have been waiting for and it whets my appetite for other States and Territories in Australia and other countries - England? Japan? the USA? Who knows.

Visitor Centres

Give or take a bit there are 100 Visitor Centres in Victoria and again, giving or taking a bit, it costs $8000 to buy a TrailRider. So equipping every Visitor Centre with a TrailRider would cost a paltry (ha ha) $800,000. This is not petty cash, even for Parks Victoria.

It is a sum of money that could be raised through crowdfunding though.

It is also quite possible that some of those visitor centres would not have the space or the trained volunteers (this needs a Sherpa Volunteer Program) to accommodate that. So that reduces the sum that would need to be raised.

The exciting thing for me here is the number of TrailRiders that would need to be purchased at this point and the amount of money that would need to be spent. This is the moment I have waited for for a long time because this would be the moment to begin Australian manufacturing. All that is needed is a manufacturer!

The moment we've all been waiting for

Joanne & Rodney (TrailRider champions) little old me,
my wife Ros, my sister Jude and her son who took the photo

The four of us that have been driving the TrailRider forward, aided by Parks Victoria, to the point where there are now 32 or 3 in Australia have been my wife Ros, my good friends Joanne and Rodney, and myself.

When I turned 65 Ros, Parks Victoria and Rodney's mum gave me the gift of my very own TrailRider which I wrote about in this post.

We took it out on Mount Beckworth on horrendously difficult ground which I wrote about again in another post.

Today, aided with the transfer into the TrailRider by my son Flynn we fulfilled the  dream of taking the TrailRider out around Newstead. 

Stories

Another not strictly TrailRider post but an attempt to tell you about my new blog at davidstrattontales.blogspot.com - with longer, voice written posts.

I want to try and take the reader to the different corners of the earth that Ros and I have travelled to and even to the two continents that I inhabited before she and I met. That is not to mention Africa. I haven't been to Asia or India though.

I'd also like to roam some engineering tracks that, thanks to Rodney (and Joanne) I still traverse.