I’m now back at home. Some pictures (more to come) are up in a flickr collection. I’m inlining some of the good ones.
Monday.
We picked up our hire car – a Ford Falcon XR6 – in the morning, from the Budget place down the road from the hotel. Hire car tip: picking up a car at the airport incurs a surcharge. In our case it would have been 15%. But you can drop off at the airport for no extra charge. So we picked ours up in the city, having used trains and shanks’ pony for a few days. Getting out of Sydney was a breeze using the extensive network of road tunnels under the city (which we were again to use when going back to the airport). Driving in Oz is easy – obviously it’s right hand drive, and many road signs are similar to the UK. The ones that aren’t tend to be similar to the USA.
So we headed South and past Botany Bay, on our way to Shellharbour where we were stopping for a few hours to see family. Mini-Elbeno fell asleep in short order, and we passed a sign indicating we only had 1027 km to Melbourne (our eventual destination). So quite a way to go on our road trip, and that’s not even counting coming back. We overshot Shellharbour but quickly righted ourselves, and by dint of recognising every other direction from Google Maps we managed to make it to Marcy and Al’s house.
Betty (my grandad’s sister) and Jack were visiting and we had a lovely lunch followed by a tour of Shellharbour. We spent a while talking and catching up before getting back on the road to Narooma around 4. Since we had a few hours’ drive ahead, we didn’t want it to get too late. The road to Narooma was a lovely drive – sweeping bends and rolling hills, with ocean views on the other side.
We arrived in Narooma – population something a little over 5,000 – after dark and found our motel on the second attempt. Google Maps isn’t very good at indicating where there is no through road. I was sent to forage for food while Mrs Elbeno tended to the offspring. Amazingly, Narooma sports two Chinese takeaways (almost half of its eating establishments!) so I picked up some food from the Ocean Palace and we refilled before bed.