Well, It has been a great adventure so far and hopefully plenty more to come. So on Sunday 4th December we sadly departed the Blue Mountains to explore Canberra for a few days. We wouldn’t actually stay in Canberra but just outside the city at the showgrounds in Bungendore.
Show grounds offer a great option to camp for a few days or more, most have power and water and are almost always substantially cheaper that the caravan parks and this one was just like that. nice and grassy, with power and water for $25 a night.
Monday we visited Cockington Green, which is a miniature town with lots of displays of types of buildings from around the world and different scenes of life. It also has a miniature train that you can have a ride on. The kids especially loved that part.
Tuesday we did Questacon which is an amazing place, full things to learn and really interactive. It has 7 sections on different areas of science. some of the highlights were for the boys, the section where they built pathways down the wall for a ball to roll. to make the path they used pipe, cardboard, sticks to go into the board and rubber bands to hold the bits to the sticks and board.
Troy and I went into the earthquake lab where the floor actually shakes just like in an earthquake. There is also another section with different activities like freefall drop and a challenge to see how fast you can throw a ball.
After some lunch at the Questacon Cafe, we headed up the road to Parliament house.
New Parliament house is a massive place and the public areas have so much art, and memorabilia. There is even rafters and burned fences from England’s parliament house and Buckingham Palace that was burned during the bombing of London in WWII.
A highlight for us was the lego parliament house complete with money tree and a Sith lord and guards.
Wednesday we did the war memorial in the morning and the dinosaur museum in the afternoon.
The war memorial is such a fascinating place to visit, with so much history and stories from the places Australians have served since as far back as the boer war. It is something that everyone should visit atleast once.
There are big exhibits for both WWI & WWII and a 3rd main area for the other conflicts from Korea to present day. There is currently a lot of construction going on there so once that is completed, i’m sure it will be even better.
The Dinosaur museum in the afternoon was ok but not what I had expected. It did have lots of different dinosaurs and information but was mostly dodgy rubber models and felt tacky. But I guess we have been a bit spoilt after having been to the dinosaur places in central QLD.
Thursday 9 December and it was time to make a move again as we had to get to albury so we could get the rego on the van transferred to Vic rego.
For the next few days we had the van setup out and a farm near Gerogery that is owned by my very kind aunt and uncle. It is a beautiful farm with cows and horses and a little side by side farm ute thing that we could take the kids for rides on.
Friday we had the van and car booked in to get some electrical work done like a proper 12 pin plug for the car and a DCDC charger for the van, so the wife and kids played around at the farm all day while I just wandered around town while I waited for the work to be done.
Saturday and sunday were fairly quiet days, doing a bit of shopping and had a great lunch at the Gerogery pub with my aunt and uncle. The rest of the weekend we just relaxed.
Monday morning I took the van to Vic roads to get transferred which took all of 10 min but had to be done. On the way back I stopped at a caravan place and found some bike racks for the kids bikes. I put them on in the afternoon before we went back into Albury to get our covid boosters and stopped in at our rellies place for a visit before we left in the morning.
Tuesday 14th December and back on the road to our next location. We headed all the way up to Long plain in the Kosciuszko NP. This is in the northern part of the NP and is a beautiful area with high plains (as the name suggests), small river, waterholes, caves and thermal pools.
After arriving at cooinbil campground mid afternoon, we explored around the camp, the hut and the nearby creek for the rest of the afternoon.
The next day ended up being a bit of a write off at one of the boys was feeling sick and it was cold and rainy. It even snowed briefly!! So instead of exploring like we planned, we had a movie day.
Thursday was a better day, partly sunny so we made our way to blue waterhole and did a short walk there. It is a very pretty spot and there are longer walks there that we would have liked to do but the gorge walk was still closed for maintenance.
On the way back out from blue waterhole, we checked out a few other camp grounds for future trips and explored Coolamine homestead.
The rest of the afternoon we relaxed at camp and tried unsuccessfully to get an fire going with wet wood.
Friday morning we took off early for yarrangobilly caves area and had a nice refreshing swim in the thermal pools. The caves and pools are a great place to spend a day in the caves and swimming but most of the family were not keen on the caves and I had done them before so we just had a swim before packing up camp and heading to the coast.
Our camp for the next few nights would be Hobart beach campground between Tathra and Merimbula. A great national parks campground with good showers and drop toilets right near the lake and only a short walk to the beach for a swim in the surf.
Saturday 17th December we went into Bega to do some washing and shopping. We even managed to get a new bbq for the van.
About lunch time we went to the Bega cheese heritage Centre which has a great little museum upstairs and a cafe downstairs. We of course couldn’t leave without sampling some of the cheese.
That evening we had to take our youngest to hospital with really bad constipation (no not caused by a visit to the cheese factory) and he ended up having to stay 3 nights with COVID and rota virus.
Sunday as it was just myself and our oldest at camp, we went to the beach in the morning and to Merimbula In the afternoon to look around town. By that night though, I was also coming down with rota virus which is a nasty gastro bug.
With mum and one boy in hospital and myself sick in the van, that pretty much wrote off most of the week.
We left Hobart beach on Wednesday 21st and made for Mallacoota where we stayed for 2 nights although we didn’t do too much here either as I was still suffering from the rota virus but slowly getting better and our youngest was still recovering as well.
The park at Mallacoota is really big and stretches along the shoreline. There are even some sites on the waterfront with their own jetties.
Friday 23rd we left Mallacoota for seaspray which is a small seaside town about 25km east of sale. The caravan Park here is really good, with very big and Grassy sites, new playground and good clean facilities.
We had a relaxing afternoon around camp while the boys had heaps of fun on the jumping pillow with other kids staying at the caravan park.
Christmas Eve we went into Sale for some last minute food supplies and a small tree for Santa to put the presents under (or at least around). We also got a few things for the caravan like anti flap clamps for the awning and a mesh side wall for the awning.
The afternoon was spent getting organised and wrapping last minute presents and hiding them again while the boys were playing. We planned to have an early night but it didn’t work out that way as certain smaller members of the family were just a bit excited.
Christmas day and the boys surprisingly slept in until just after 7, Before excitedly waking us up saying Santa has been and he ate the cake and carrots we last him.
Of course the 1st order of the day was to open the presents despite suggesting we have breakfast 1st. The boys were very happy with new trucks and planes to play with.
Once everything was unwrapped and the wrapping cleaned up, we made ham, cheese and tomato croissants for breakfast followed by playing with the new toys. Before we knew it, it was time to cook Xmas lunch which was pork belly and roast veggies with gravy. Mmmmm yum. We also got a visit from the rural fire brigade handing out lollies with their truck.
In the afternoon we went for a walk down the beach to where the river flows into the sea. Here the kids can splash and play in the water without worrying about getting swept away by waves. We relaxed and looked for nice sea shells while the kids built sand castles and moats.
We finally headed back to camp about 5pm and had leftovers for dinner before crashing in bed. It has been a very good Xmas day.
That’s all for part 5 of our trip. In the next part we will be heading west to south Australia, the limestone coast and Adelaide.
A Love of Adventures 