Road Trip up the coast

Robert and I took a week off work last November, for a little road trip for Rob's birthday. This was the first proper camping trip up the coast with our new wheels.

We finally bought ourselves a new (used) car. We had been looking around to find something that would be in good condition, versatile, and that would be comfortable for various road trips/camping trips. And voila! We decked out our Subaru Outback for extreme versatile camping, where we took out the back seats, and put a comfy camping couch in the back to sleep, it's restricted in space, but functional and hassle free. Drive, get to your destination, sleep. No setting up tent, no getting wet when it rains.

I sewed some nice curtains for the car windows for sleeping time, as proper camping vans have. We thought we had everything covered, but we soon found out that we overlooked the sun roofs...not that people can look in from there, but mosquitoes can and will find their way in. A couple of nights in, we camped somewhere with tons of those little buggers. You fall asleep, then you start hearing zZzzzZz....wake up, proceed to a mosquitoes mass massacre counting the corpses along the way. Once you decided you've done well, you proceed to falling asleep, thinking you are safe, wrapping your blanket around your face for extra protection. What fools we are... We woke up with so many mosquitos' bites that we looked like we had some really unhealthy disease. After this night, the mosquitoes were the single most hated thing on this earth.



We also had fun with car related problems, and got our first flat tire! It was a slow leak tire, which we spotted one late afternoon, and proceeded to filling the tire up again and buying one of those little pressure gauge to check it. Drove on it a little, it looked fine, so we figure it could wait and we'll see if it needs fixing later. We then drove out in the bush to try to find this really out of the way secluded camping spot on the beach. The sun was going down fast, the road was unsealed and did not show up on my iphone map...and we had an almost flat tire. This is how some horror movies start. Really, it was a perfect setting. We finally made it to the camping, alive...and we woke up to a flat tire.

We drove from Melbourne to Sydney, and stopped at various places along the way. Highlights include a hike at Pigeon House Mountain on the south coast of NSW, and Jervis Bay in NSW. Halfway into the week it started raining, and despite remaining hopeful that it would stop any time...it didn't, for a while. And then New South Wales got flooded.

The first leg of the trip went really well, but once it started raining, we gave up camping and settled in Sydney for a few rainy days. We never made it to the Blue Mountains, which was the ultimate destination of this trip. Nevertheless, some good times were had, some pretty things were seeen, and it's always good to take time off. We'll see you another time Blue Mountains.




We drove by a forrest fire. It looked like it would've burnt all afternoon, and that was the last bit of it.






The hike at Pigeon House Mountain was pretty spectacular. The climb to the summit is quite steep and on the last leg of the trail, you get to climb a series of steel ladders attached to the cliff face. This last part of the trail was pretty cool, but gives you a bit of vertigo if you dare to look down - so you hang on tight and make sure you don't miss a step.
Once we reached the summit, there was no one up there but us, and we got magnificient 360º panoramic views of the surrounding area. The sky quickly turned from a peaceful blue to a stormy grey, and we could see the black cloud formations moving our way, very quickly. We stayed a bit, and just barely made our way down the steel ladders before it started pouring...and then we luckily found a cave to shelter in while the worst of the storm passed us by.