Pepsi Next is the new breed of cola. Pepsi Next has naturally less sugar*, it’s sweetened naturally with stevia and, of course, has the great cola taste you love.

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Some days it feels as though the city sucks at my soul.

I love people… but there are so many of them here, so close together. There is humanity next to us, in front of us, behind us. We live in a small, relatively quiet block between two busy roads. I find myself wondering how long it’s been since I’ve been more than a few hundred metres away from another person. It’s as though I can feel other people’s consciousness intruding on me. Sucking the vitality from here.

I miss my TinyTrainHouse, where it was almost always quiet. Where the silence was so complete I could hear every bird call from the dense bush behind me. Where dusk brought in the high pitched hum of cicadas and the echoey galump of frogs. The laughter of kookaburras. The squawks of cockatoos.

Here dusk brings people noises. Voices and dishes clanging against each other, with spikes of laughter railing through them. It brings a more intense hum to the constant background din of traffic. On still nights, sitting in my backyard waiting for the cool change to come through, I can hear the occasional deep frequency of  a train on the tracks a few hundred metres away, and the dinging warming signal that the traffic gates are closing.

I don’t notice how much I miss the bush and the wide open spaces until I see them again. Until I spot a rolling hill dotted with trees, or sit on the back porch of The Farm and listen to the night sounds. It’s then that the muscles in my back relax and I feel myself expanding from the inside out. It’s then that I relaise how much I need it.

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With the Most Amazing Man so into his bushwalking, getting out of the city and into the bush is a semi-regular activity. I love the Dandenongs. It’s lush and green and dense. Some of the eucalypts are five feet wide and must have been there for hundreds of years. I love the fernery and the leaf litter, the tiny creeks and the waterfalls.

It’s hot and sweltering the day we visit Olinda Falls. While Melbourne is colder than Sydney, it’s also hotter. The sun has a bite to it that makes it feel as though you’re a few hundred metres too close to the sun. It’s a dry, stark heat. Some afternoons it feels as though the world will implode from the pressure of all that hot air. 

It’s only 450 metres to the Falls. The Bump falls over every fifty metres or so. The sweat is running of us and we seem to move from patch of shade to patch of shade. The quality of the sun on your skin is more a searing fry than a baking slow roast.

Olinda Falls is a gentle, bubbling rock slope with falls that are shallow and graded enough that you can get right up close to them. If you stay up creek of the small foot bridge, you don’t have to worry about being swept away. The water is no more than a few inches deep.

We sit in the shade provided by the canopy above us. The kids and I remove our shoes and sit, our feet in the freezing water, feeling our body temperature drop by rapid degrees.

The kidlets giggle and splash. The Most Amazing Man snaps photos. And I feel my soul recharge, sipping the lush vitality from the bush around me.

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This post is part of a Nuffnang native advertising series.

Pepsi Next is the new breed of cola. Pepsi Next has naturally less sugar*, it’s sweetened naturally with stevia and, of course, has the great cola taste you love.

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