Advertisement
Published: October 19th 2012
Edit Blog Post
We got a bargain when it came to the Campervan! When vans go out on hire, they sometimes need them to be relocated, say from melbourne to Sydney for the next person to pick them up, thats where we come in! We had 3 days to drive the little campervan from Melbourne to Sydney at the huge sum of 5 aus dollars a day and we got our petrol paid for, good times!!
After the trauma with the passports we were only about an hour behind and on our way! We planned to stop off at some national park land called Cape Conrad over the first night and this was 400KM away. The drive was mostly inland today and although pretty it rained....and rained and rained, a bit like England. By the time we arrived at the camping spot, it was pitch black and this was a really secluded "bush campsite" no one was at reception, just a note saying to pitch up and post your money through the door, there was no lights, no sign of life and a lot of trees animals and no doubt things that could kill us! Given our camper had no bathroom and we
couldn't see one, we decided to give up and head for the nice holiday park down the road. We pitched up there and had a little bbq and had a chilled night playing cards. The campsite was empty so we had all the facilities to ourselves but less wildlife! The facilities at all the campsites are so good, there are gas BBQ's everywhere in aus, campsites, parks, beaches making it easy to toss on a few shrimps and have some food!
We got on the road a bit later the next morning, thinking we had plenty of time. About an hour into our nice woodland drive, on a much sunnier day we suddenly noticed a small chip in the windscreen. Had no idea if it was there before, no idea when it appeared, but we knew that the excess for that was going to be $100. So instead of enjoying the nicer day and the lovely drive, we spent a lot of time dashing in and out of garages in towns looking for someone to fix the chip before it got worse. For future reference, if you want anything done in Aus on the saturday of a bank holiday
weekend, just forget about it. Everything closes for the whole weekend in small towns! We had driven straight through the day, only stopping for petrol when we pulled into Batemans bay just before 5pm, the place we had been told would be most likely to help but again, everything was closed. We found ourselves a campsite (far to expensive as all the locals were there for the bank holiday) but ran by nice people, the husband of the couple being literally the most Aussie man we had met so far, "G'day matey" and the like! Luckily as we actually got there in the light, we got to enjoy a beer while we watched the sun go down over the bay. Then we had a BBQ and some of our Maclaren Vale wine in the campervan.
We set off at 10am the next day, again thinking we only had about 230km to cover by 3pm. There were pretty stiff penalties for returning the van late, up to an hour cost you $150 and after that your full $1000 bond, so we were not planning on being late. The rest of the drive was lovely, all along the coast and beautiful
weather. We stopped at a place called Kiama which was a busy beach town with rock blowholes along the coast. They had a public "rock pool" swimming pool by the beach and we had a little walk and had our lunch by the sea. We started driving for the afternoon and again realised we were short of time, going to have to get the hang of the time scales of these roads eventually! So James had to Lewis Hamilton the van back to Sydney, despite missing the turning we needed and a few angry outbursts, we got the van back at 3.05pm, nobody noticed the chip in the window, or the time we returned so we got all our money back and were on our way!
We loved having our own space in the campervan, especially after being in the hostel in melbourne. However we needed more time. Looking forward to giving the campervan thing another go, but will probably be NZ now!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.106s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 42; dbt: 0.0613s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb