Hawks Nest to Forster

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Water Break: Auora Snax

This was supposed to be the longest mileage day of the trip according to the book and it was supposed to have some pretty good hills in it too. We debated at length about taking the shorter route the lady on the ferry told us about… but it would be dirt and it rained hard all night and it was really a walking track… we just weren’t sure and we didn’t want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere when the day was going to be long anyway. We decided to ride to the turn off she recommended and decide then.

We ate breakfast in the tent since it was raining, had our devotions and read our proclamations and then without much excitement we began packing up. Two kookaburras came by to visit and sat on the ground near us eating some bread someone had tossed out. That was kind of cool!

The morning was through bushland national parks. We were actually quite close to the ocean but you couldn’t see it. The roads were deserted and at least for the first ten miles they were sealed. We rode side by side, keeping a good pace and just riding. It reminded me of riding a stationary bike at the MAC so I asked Larry to change the channel, which he did – to Nick at Night, the Brady Bunch… and then we just kept changing channels…. CSI – ‘well, I took it to trace and you won’t believe what they found….’; ESPN … what about the Colts chances in the playoffs…. Australia went down shamefully at the Ashes in Cricket…., and well you get the idea. We were really bored. Long flat road lined with miles of ‘bushes’ heaped with wildlife that you never see…. There are huge locusts in these bushlands though – they are deafening with there collective roaring noise. We even joke about them coming to get us – here they come… run, ride hard, their getting closer…. Yes… we are bored with this bushland stuff! We did stop at one place because there were sand dunes and a path going up them. I put on my sandals and hiked up the dune (Larry didn’t want to get sand on his feet… how crazy is that?). anyway – it was actually a pretty cool experience. I climbed up the dune expecting to see the ocean just on the other side. Instead there was a higher bigger dune. So I climbed up that one and to my surprise it opened up in to a grand expanse of dunes – sand as far as you could see in either direction and the ocean in the distance. Very spectacular. I took pictures which Larry thought were cool.. but not cool enough to get sand in his shoes! Anyway I had fun – although I had forgotten it was going to be a long day so I shouldn’t take too many side trips!

We finished this section of the ride at a cable ferry that ran every half hour. We waited about 15minutes and then the driver brought it across and pulled us over – took about ten minutes for the whole thing to happen. We stopped on the other side at a small general store and got a drink and candy bar before heading back into the ‘bush’ on what would now be dirt roads.

Today would prove to be a day when we had ‘the lot of it’ as they would say here. A bit of everything. Rain, sun, wind, sealed roads, dirt roads, terrible muddy nasty roads, deserted roads, mega traffic roads, no shoulder, great shoulder… ah we just took it one piece at a time – each piece being what it was.

The dirt section we started on was fair to pour, but we hadn’t seen really bad yet either. It poured on us and then the sun came out and the humidity was obnoxious. We got tired of putting on the rain coats and then taking them off so we just got wet. Besides our jackets were smelly and clammy and well – why bother. We got back to pavement through some farm land rolling with hay and cattle and then rounded a bend and went down a hill and our deserted morning burst into life in a town and the busy Pacific Coast Highway. We ate lunch at the IGA sidewalk being blessed with some great peaches, grapes and pb and J. We rode the PC Highway for about 10 miles and then turned onto Lakes Highway. Australia has one main road – what we would call an interstate in the US. Below New South Wales it is called the Princess Highway and above it is called the Pacific Coast. It is not like our interstates though – most of the time it is two way traffic with one way having two lanes and the other one lane and then they switch for ‘overtaking zones’. Anyway they can be crazy busy and the speed limit is 60mph most places and sometimes there isn’t even a shoulder. The Lakes Highway was a bit better as the traffic wasn’t as bad. We had some big hills here (we had opted for the book route not the shorter route the ferry lady had recommended). We climbed well and the weather seemed to follow us – sun out on the up, rain on the down! We stopped in at a bus shelter one particular hard rain and got out a muesli bar and a banana. We had done 42 miles by now and we were pretty sure we were making good time, but the ride was very boring. We got out the ipods for the last 22 miles. This helped a lot. We were passing through ‘beautiful country’ today with lakes, ocean and bushes. Only problem was there was so much fog you couldn’t see the lakes, the ocean was covered by the bushes and well we really didn’t see anything… but we could feel the salt in the rain!

We finally got to Forester and found a campground. It was a very soggy place. It has rained almost every day of this trip and up here in the north the humidity makes it harder to deal with cause things don’t dry out. We got our tent up in the distant back of the huge campground – that’s where they put you if you have a little tent! It seems like miles to the bathroom! Any way we got out tent up quickly so it didn’t get wet and then walked to the grocery store to find some food. The walk there was in the dry – but it poured while we were in there! But it was just misting as we walked back. This place has a bbq, but we opted to buy a chicken already cooked, added salad. We went to the bbq to eat as there was a covered picnic table. We ate like zombies – it had been a long day and we hadn’t been sleeping well. The day ended up being 64 crazy miles…

After dinner we went back to the tent and laid down and talked a few minutes and both rested before evening chores. We both fell asleep for about thirty minutes. Then we got up and did our evening tasks before taking on a game of Rummy. Larry was out side the tent hanging up a towel under a palm tree (they will dry even it rain sometimes if the tree is good). He was about to toss the towel up on the tree and said to me “Hey that branch looks like an owl – hey it is an owl… no it’s a kookaburra!” and sure enough we were standing face to face with our very own guardian kookaburra! He stayed there, let us take pictures and still did not leave! We went to sleep under his care!