Freeeeedom!

10^th March – 14th March 2025

After what seems like an eternity, we are finally able to continue our travels. Sure, it’s only a short trip, just long enough to see how well mum can cope by herself, but still…it’s a trip and nothing is going to stop us, not even cyclone Alfred.

Now, where to go? Not too far, we must be able to get home (it’s scary that we call Port Macquarie home) quickly if mum needs us. Not too wet, which is virtually impossible thanks to Albert and not too dry, we want to be able to use the kayaks. We don’t want much do we?

We decided on Split Rock Damn, a 340km drive west/north from Port, which includes a section of the Great Dividing Range. On the morning of the 10^th Alfred convinced us not to go over the range. It’s tricky with a van at the best of times but with this much rain, you can expect fallen trees, rockfalls and road falls, but that wasn’t going to stop us. We’d just go the long way around.

As you can tell from the maps, we didn’t make it to Split Rock Dam. We’d been driving south down the Pacific Hwy for a couple of hours in the pouring rain, when we saw a sign for the Myall Lakes National Park. We’d never actually been there but after a quick Google search I’d located a campground and booked ourselves in. As soon as we arrived, we extended our one-night stay to three.

It continued to rain for the first two days, we didn’t mind, then it cleared up on the third. We booked another night. We would have stayed longer but the site was fully booked. We had a lovely time on and in the water. We had a sandy, little beach was which was great for swimming, even though you had to walk a couple of kms to get more than thigh deep.

While Peter enjoyed the area on his new push bike, I decided to do the circuit walk that left from our camp. It was a short walk so, what could go wrong? Now right here and now, I’m going to blame the mozzies. I mean, they were really, really, bad. Every time I stopped, which I do frequently with my camera, I became a living mozzie attraction. On top of that it was 33 degrees c and incredibly humid. I’d only been walking about fifteen minutes when I called it and headed back to Chunky Bum for my mozzie net and bug spray.

And this is where it all went wrong. I zigged when I should have zagged and after a much longer than expected time, I finally burst out of the jungle into the camp site, only it wasn’t’ mine. I figured out where I was, and where I had gone wrong, and decided to take the wet weather track home as it was the shortest and, it was wet. Made sense to me. Well, it would have been had the track not slowly vanished from existence.

I did eventually get home, hot, tired, sweaty and covered in mozzie bites so I went for a swim. I tried again the next day, but with the same humid conditions, and nothing to protect me but my mozzie net, (the bug spray was so old it didn’t spray) I didn’t stay in the jungle for too long.

Peter and I were sitting by the lakes edge one evening when a group turned up to go prawning. Not off a boat but by pulling the net between four of them around the edge of the lake. We were quite interested and the group allowed me to take some photos of them at work.

We had a welcome visitor in the camp one day, a stunning Lace Monitor. For non-Australians, this is a subspecies of goanna. He was a lovely fellow and hung around the camp for several hours giving me plenty of opportunities to take his photo. I reckon this fella’s about a metre and a half from nose to tail.

There wasn’t a lot of bird life while we were there, I think most were still sheltering from Alfred, but I had fun watching this pelican enjoy his bath time.

Of course there were a few other birds as well, but this first is my favourite shot of all. Talk about timing. The Pacific black duck landed in front of me on dead calm water, at dusk. The lighting was perfect, the reflection spot on, I just love this shot.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to Split Rock Damn soon.

See you out there somewhere

On tow and on the go!