Our first day on the road. This could grow on me 🙂
The morning was still busy with emptying the last few things from our house, locking up, feeding the chickens one last time and ‘hey surprise! An egg’ as parting gift from the chickens. While saying goodbye to neighbours we found how many people like to potter around in their pyama’s while unsuspecting visitors.
The neighbourhood will have to endure a week of the roadside throw away stuff to be collected by council but many promised to increase the pile by unwanted gifts, something everyone seems to do and I must admit that I’m guilty of this practice too.
The first time we hooked up the trailer behind the bus everything seems to work. A little puzzle was to try and unlock the perfect fitting padlocks on the 20 litre drums for diesel and water. They fit so well that it is hard to find the keyhole. Ah well, a quest for when we really need them.
Leaving Sydney seemed emotionally difficult so we took the longest possible detour via Coles for some last shopping and a circling visit to the Shell. On the highway in Wahroonga the petrol station is on the other side of the road and only accessible by circling the block twice; once to get access to the petrol station and once more to leave it in the direction we wanted to go.
The bus odometer is set on: 294,350
By then the clouds had parted and we could join the F3 motorway heading north. This road is well known, we regularly take it going to La Manda, our rental vacation home in Smiths Lake (link: La Manda). The road starts with a big hill that normally we drive with 110kph like everyone else. Now we find there’s another category of road users that struggle to go any faster than 40kph and we joined this stream of trucks. The rest of the road also showed that from not being concerned about hills and bends we now feel ourselves part of the trucking community that cares about down shifting up and breaking down hill. We event went sofar that we signaled extended semi-trailers when it was safe to return to the left lane after passing us, one kph faster than we were going and we got rewarded by the blinking left and right indicators.
With two stops in Heatherbrea (we had the McDonalds Sydney Stack for lunch, verdict: not recommended) and a roadside stop we arrived at Kempsey and turned off to Crescent Head. Luckily this is one of Marjo’s regular stops on her annual pilgrimage with Els the air hostess so via a winding road, roadside watching roo’s and the worst corrugated and potholed 5 km road (ok, I admit I’m not used to much) we tried to find the camping in the dark. Arriving at some turnoff I decided not to turn in head first but park our rig (sounds impressive) on the round and walk to see in the pitch dark whether we would not drive straight into the local swamp. Luckily a local stopped and gave instructions after which we arrived at the campsite, parked on the first reasonably looking spot and got out. In no time we had seats out, dog beds, awning and while Marjo looked at food options, I got friendly with a neighbouring camper (a young couple doing the same as us but with a brand new ute converted with sleep-on-fold-out) and begged for his wood. With everything still wet from the weeks of rain dry wood is hard to come by but with his dry wood and some other found woodcuts we managed a small fire that the dogs approved of too.
Not much later, after dinner (yummy beanstew with chicken mince), coffee (with oat and raisin cookies) and beer/wine we hit our beds. Marjo expertly made everything work. Evening wash, all the things you might ever need to go to sleep and wake up and for the dogs a perfect cosy nest in the front of the bus.
All in all a perfect day (a well, we won’t tell that I forgot to lock the trailer and that I left the keys all night in the door of the gas bottle with the door wide open).
Odometer: 294,769
Posted from Crescent Head, New South Wales, Australia.
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