Oh I do love a good family trip away. It is such a big to do, packing and cleaning and getting everyone in the car and trying to get away at a decent time.
We managed to get underway by 10am, which was one hour behind schedule, but pretty good considering. The traffic wasn't too bad up our end of the coast, well at least in the direction that we were travelling. I did feel sorry for those heading north as they reached the new bottle neck of Macksville. Every time a new section of road gets opened the bottle neck moves to another location just a little further along the road. The Beautiful Kempsey bypass is open and now Macksville is copping the endless lines of traffic, stretching for kilometres.
The thing that I like about travelling at Christmas time is all the silly bling that you see. Tinsel and lights, Christmas decorations and Santa hats abound everywhere. It's a nice way to break up the monotony of a long journey to be rewarded with random displays of silliness. We saw a few good ones on the way. The big brown dump truck up on a pole just outside Macksville that had a big inflatable Santa riding in the tray and the truck itself was adorned with reindeer antlers.
There were lots of cars dressed as reindeers too, or just sporting a nifty little bit of tinsel. It's so nice to have a time in the year where everyone can let their silly side out for a bit of a run.
Our intention this trip is to stay at various scout camps/ halls in lieu of accommodation. Our first stop was an over nighter at Woy Woy where we camped at the Kariong scout camp. It was a big regional camping ground like Glenreagh with amenties block, camp warden, dorms, activities and different camp spots. It was a bit of a hike to get into the camp, but we had trolleys to help us. When we booked it we kinda thought it would a little remote and we would pretty much have the place to ourselves. When we turned up at the car park there were about 30 other cars there. So this was not going to be a quiet camp by any stretch of the imagination. Bankstown Scouts were there and they were intent on having a raucous time. Luckily we were far enough away for it not to be an issue.
Unluckily, they were near the toilet blocks and we weren't. I had decided that a twinkle in the bush was going to be just fine for me as I was not too fussed on heading up to the toilets in the middle of the night. Steve was not so lucky. He came down with the tummy bug, and not only spent all day feeling extremely poorly, but decided to pick that night to get a bad case of the trots. He found himself haunting the toilet block for a goodly proportion of the night. By morning he was totally wrecked and could merely supervise the pack up of camp.
With another full day's travel, Steve was happy to sit back in air conditioned comfort while we drove along. Ellie travelled relatively well and managed to sleep through a good portion of the journey on both days. She coped so well in fact that I was bursting with milk by the time we reached camp on the first day. She was so interested in everything and the places that we were going, that a feed was pretty low on her priority list.
We got to Bateman's Bay around 3.30pm today after we had a stop in Nowra for lunch. We reaffirmed the fact that we are not overly enamoured of the place. Today, in particular, it was hot and sticky. We were pretty glad to be on our way again and back in the air conditioned car.
We will spend 6 days here in the Bateman's Bay scout hall. We are not allowed to camp inside, but we have full use of the kitchen and bathroom facilities. And we have the place to ourselves. The kids are busy, as I type this, pitching our big tent outside. We will sleep out there, but have a nice cool hall to retreat to in the heat of the day.
Tomorrow we head to Narooma to check out our old house and visit some old friends. I am looking forward to seeing the town again. Every time that we go there, some little things have changed and slowly it is starting to feel less and less like our Narooma. It's always a mixture of happy and sad heading back there. Happy to reminisce and see good friends, but sad that as is the case in life, things have a way of moving on and changing.
No comments:
Post a Comment