Sale to Sydney-With a HUGE thunderstorm in the Middle

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Day 138-139

21^st-22^nd January

After our slightly weird stay in Sale we hit the road early, planning on stopping for breakfast at the first decent sized town we could find. This ended up being a place called Lakes Entrance which was a touristy town on the shore. We had a little wander around and some beans on toast in a café which was very nice indeed! Most of the day was spent driving, following Route 1 all the way round the coast of Victoria and into New South Wales. I’ve just looked it up on googlemaps and we covered 478km that day, pretty epic, and I finally decided I’d done enough driving just before we got to a town called Narooma which looked pretty nice and we found a place to stay called The Tree Motel. I went in to book a room while Ellory unloaded the car. The couple who owned it were very friendly but when they saw I was travelling with a man, they did ask if we were married before they let me have the keys! Not sure what would have happened if I’d said we weren’t married! The room was very comfortable and had a fridge which was great for us to store our food in. It also had tea and coffee facilities and I made ample use of them for the night we were there.



Feeling hungry but not in the mood to get back in the car we decided to go for a walk and try and find somewhere to eat. We wandered down to the sea hoping there would be a seaside restaurant or something but no luck, so we had to get back in the car and drive around trying to find somewhere. Eventually we found another bit of the coastline where there were lots of seaside food places so we parked up, and hoped we could get a meal quickly as we were very very hungry by that point! There was a fish and chip restaurant and it looked good to us so we went to go and get a table. It was very strange, the place was pretty empty but every table had a ‘reserved’ sign on it. It was about half six so not that late, and we had to promise that we would be out by 8pm before they would give us a table. We ordered a slap up meal of, surprise, surprise, fish and chips and by the time we were half way through them, the restaurant was heaving! Fortunately, whoever had reserved our table didn’t turn up so we were allowed to stay as long as we liked. The weather was also closing in as well and we heard several rumbles of thunder as we finished our meal. The storm finally kicked off as we returned to our car and it was one of the strangest storms either of us have ever seen. There was a huge amount of very close lightning (we could see where it was striking the ground) and the thunder was deafening, but there was no rain. So Ellory and I tried to get some lightning pictures, we weren’t successful but we got some good moody sky ones! Eventually the rain caught up with the storm and it absolutely lashed it down, we fled back to the car but got pretty drenched in the process. Deciding to call it a night we headed back to our motel and chilled out there for the rest of the night. Not very exciting maybe but it’s pretty tiring driving nearly 500km in one day!



The next day we had to reach Sydney as we were due to drop off our hire car and meet up with Wade and Melissa the next day. We still had around 350km to go so we hit the road fairly early and did not stop until we reach Kiama. We knew of Kiama because that is where Wade is from and where his parents still live so we thought we’d stop there for lunch. Kiama has some lovely beaches and is very popular with surfers so after we had plates of pasta at an Italian restaurant we headed down to the beach to laze in the sun for a while. Once again, everyone was very blonde, tanned and gorgeous. There is no way I could move to Australia; my self esteem wouldn’t be able to handle it! However we had a relaxing hour by the ocean before we had to push onto Sydney. We eventually made it and then we had to once again find somewhere to sleep. This was much harder in Sydney where we struggled to find anywhere with parking. Eventually and by pure chance we stumbled on a Formule 1 motel on the outskirts and got a room. Neither one of us had ever stayed in a Formule 1 motel before and the bathroom was the smallest I’d ever seen, like a plane bathroom but with a shower! However out of the window I could see two things, a McDonalds and a KFC, not the classiest of eating establishments we know, but we headed out for a McDs for Ellory and a KFC for me. Our crazy journey from Melbourne to Sydney was over, and we wouldn’t recommend trying to do it in 3 days! However it was done and we were both very much looking forward to meeting up with Wade and Melissa the next morning and spending the week with them.

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