Jacarandas and rainbows

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Well, here we are travelling again. This is just a quick trip .. north to make a furniture delivery for Jason and one we wanted to do before covering the motor home for summer.

We left home on Tuesday, calling in to visit friends Carole and Joe at Taree and spending the night at Port Macquarie. Yesterday we kept on our fast trip north staying overnight at beautiful Ballina. The waterway there is truly great, the beaches wonderful as are all those on the NSW coast. Our only diversion was to Grafton where we once more went to see the lovely jacarandas in flower. We love to drive up and down the Grafton streets to see the mauve flowers on the trees and carpetted on the ground, they really are a beautiful sight. The prettiness continued with those trees dotted further along the river and in paddocks as we drove further north.

Yesterday we headed west from Ballina into the hinterland and to the pretty town of Mullumbimby and then across the lush green hills on a windy, narrow road sometimes driving through rainforest, broken in parts with quite beautiful scenery over to the ocean. Where the land was cleared the hills were covered with macadamia and avocado trees and we passed a couple of small macadamia processing plants, possibly extracting the macadamia oil.

We decided we hadn't been to Nimbin for quite awhile so headed there after making our delivery at Rosebank. Nimbin is quite an old established hippy town .. most buildings sport interesting painted features, often a painted rainbow and I noticed even the school building is painted every colour of the rainbow. Dreadlocks and pony tails are the favoured hairdo for the men, the shops seem to sell a lot of sarongs, incense and sandals (though bare feet seem to be favoured in town). It's always fun to have a look at Nimbin - hippies pick the best places to live. We then headed back east towards the now busy town of Murwillumbah passing through Uki, another little alternate town.

We thought we'd spend the weekend on the coast so from Murwillumbah we first looked at Kingscliffe, the beach just south of the Queensland border. It's nice there but perhaps would be a tad noisy on the weekend, so instead drove south and ended up here at Hastings Point. We are just across the river and the ocean and the little shop nearby sell fish and chips, we have all we want!

We are having beautifully warm sunny days earlier with rain at night but last night was dry. Here's hoping the sun continues to shine.

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Photos

Nimbin
The message on his blackboard was funny .. click to get a closer look