Don’t you wish that sometimes you had just kept your mouth shut? There I am with the glossy tourist information brochures, perusing what is on offer in this new area for us to explore. More National Parks, reserves, restaurants, shopping, the ocean and oh, the Illawarra Fly Tree Top Walk. “That looks interesting” I said when we rolled into Shellharbour a few days ago. To which Andy’s response is, "we will do that then". So today is the day and after our morning ablutions and hanging our sleeping bags on the washing line to air out in this lovely ocean breeze, we set off. So, The Illawarra Fly tree top walk is a 1½ Kilometre walk starting off at ground level then rising up on a steel gantry that generally is around 20 mtrs from the ... read more

Day 85 Sitting here on this glorious sunny and warm, no, scratch that, hot day cooled only by the ocean breeze, the tide is coming in across the rocks below our camp site and the distant horizon, so vast, reveals the curvature of the earth. We have decided to have a holiday and extend our stay here, with such a beautiful outlook, however that does come with a small problem, the pitch that we are on is booked from Sunday night, the new occupiers will arrive and spend 32 nights here which means that if we want to stay at this camp site we will have to move to a different pitch, still only 4 places down, and still overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A holiday? I can hear you all asking, well we have been very ... read more

Day 83 We had every intention of going to Sydney today, our plan was to get the bus in to Manley, then the Fast Cat ferry over to Circular key. Once we had some breakfast and by the time we got ourselves together we looked at the bus time table and found that we would have to wait another 45 minutes for a bus, so we drove directly to Manley parked in the Australian equivalent of an NCP carpark and jumped on the fast cat from there. The Ferry ride is only half an hour, really pleasant in the sunshine, we sat at the front of the boat as if we were on a school outing. . I had heard on the radio this morning about a cruise liner that was in or coming in at ... read more

Day 81 We got up this morning and the mist and cloud from the mountain had truly rolled in and with light drizzle everything was absolutely soaked. Rain or not it was our plan to move on and it all had to be packed away, still the blessing was inside the trailer we were lovely and dry and warm. Heads down *rse up we piled in and got on with it, everything packed away in the trailer, top protective cover zipped on and we were done. Definitely done all right, we had lost the keys to the truck. High and low we looked, then we thought that we had possibly left them on top of the bed in the trailer that was now packed away. Sod it I am not getting it all out again in ... read more

DAY 79 It was a much cooler night, a huge difference from the warm winds the night before. In fact we actually found ourselves getting inside the sleeping bag in the wee hours of the morning to keep warm. We also slept better, but so well that we slept in until 8.00, but as it is Sunday and today we are in no rush as we decided to stay an extra day as we set up an am Skype session and also we wanted to stay around Forbes because we are basing today on our evening activity. We managed to Skype our friends Gary and Karen as we had not seen/spoken to them properly for weeks. The Skype session was quite poor, we could not hear or see them, although that was not entirely a ... read more