Mid September found us heading up to the beautiful Grassy Head Hideaway for a few days with our friends Tim and Virginia. It was the very beginning of Spring so can slip back into winter weather unexpectedly but we were very lucky enjoying, pretty much, wall to wall sunshine.
Grassy Head is on a particularly gorgeous stretch of coast about three hours north of us, the beaches are glorious and very popular with surfers (and sharks) and the roads are lined with dense woodland. Most of the surrounding towns are worth a visit, we particularly like South West Rocks and the Smoky Cape lighthouse, while Macksville has all a visitor could need in terms of shops, restaurants and entertainment. 
The others are all very understanding that most places are still new to me and this trip they took me to see Bellingen, which was originally built as an inland port for the timber industry in the area because boats could not navigate past that point of the Bellinger River. It is also in the middle of rich agricultural land which led to Bellingen becoming quite a wealthy little town.  The buildings are clearly listed because the interiors as well as the exteriors are untouched and there are a smattering of deco buildings there too. The town is now home to well heeled refugees from the big cities pursuing an alternative lifestyle. 

 Monty's best buddy Tim's dog Monty (yes I know it's confusing, it doesn't help that they are the same breed and colour and have identical habits) came too and they had a brilliant time on Grassy Head beach. So did we as a pod of dolphins pottered along really close to the edge allowing some surfers to paddle out amongst them, then Virginia spotted a whale blow in the distance and we were able to watch several of them frolicking around out to sea. 

On our return home we found a flower show was to be held at the weekend. We do not hold out too much hope for these things in a small community like ours but felt we should go along and support it. The standard was pretty good with some very creative entries but I still love to see the flowers and plants which are completely unfamiliar to European eyes like the waratahs and proteas, I have tried to grow these and killed a couple so far but I now have one that seems to be hanging on to life by the skin of of its teeth so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

 There were also all kinds of orchids, which again I am only used to seeing indoors so I have been inspired to plant a couple outside, everyone says they are easy.....we will have to see! 

Winter is now definitely over, the weather seems to switch very suddenly into spring on September 1st and the shorts and t-shirts come back out for another nine months. Australia is unique in my experience in that even on the coldest days (admittedly only about 15C) when we are wearing our warmest coats, there is always someone wandering around wearing a vest (or singlet), shorts and flip flops (or thongs) even sometimes barefoot!
So with the weather renewing our enthusiasm for the outdoor life we decided to head back to Wollombi where we had spotted the free camping when we went there with Robin, our visitor from London.
Free camping is much more popular here than in England for a number of reasons, among them are space available and being able to keep warm without power. We had noticed a couple of people camping behind the pub in Wollombi and, upon asking, found that the toilets are left open 24 hours in return for the campers spending a bit of money in the bar, we thought we could manage that so off we set. 

Wollombi is in the Hunter Valley and only about a 90 minute drive from us, we arrived to find we had the place to ourselves and set up our caravan beside the creek. It was wonderful and we realised we had been wasting quite a bit of money on campsites in the past, they are never much less than $30 a night and we have a pretty comprehensive solar set up on the van and gas cooking equipment so did not miss much at all. The only issue is lack of showers but we have a camping shower so can make do when the weather is warm but that is more of an issue if it is colder. 
The little historic town was delightful again. Apart from being a staging post on the convict built road from Sydney to the Hunter, it is the home of Dr. Jurd's Jungle Juice, a drink originally made from the dregs of wine barrels and said to have medicinal properties but now it is commercially produced in its own right and bears a resemblance to port.
 It is also a bit of a cosmic place, many of the properties have been bought by city dwellers who have decided to get themselves a few acres and just sit and paint or whittle or whatever. There are a couple of art galleries and we made the mistake of going into one which was manned by a group of women in woolly hats. The artwork was an entire room with birds made of wool hanging from the ceiling and branches distributed around with dreamcatchers in them. Once in it was tricky to get out without being noticed and one of the women started to tell us how this was their offering to Mother Earth as Mother Earth is all around us blah di blah.... luckily another bunch of unsuspecting tourists wandered in and we made a quick getaway.
Joking aside, the cosmic element is a lot of fun and many of the old buildings have been restored using recycled materials thereby maintaining an appropriate appearance for their age. 
We were in a great spot for visiting the Hunter Valley, which is a funny place really, one minute the countryside is all beautiful valleys and wineries, the next minute you are among some of the largest open cut coalmines in the world. The motto on the sign at the entrance to Cessnock, a town right in the heart of the Hunter is 'Cessnock - Wines, Mines and People'. All this added to splendid wildlife, a Blue Tongued Lizard joined us for coffee and we saw plenty of birds we do not get on the coast like this charming little Double Barred Finch..

Our visitors are all safely back in England now after their adventures Down Under. In the wake of our epic driving trip out west, we were not feeling much like travelling anywhere so were delighted to discover some excitement was on its way to us. The FIM Asia Supermoto Championship was coming to Newcastle and would be free to the public! 

We decided to go on the Saturday to watch practice and qualifying and set off on a rather windy morning to catch the ferry across the mouth of the Hunter River to the city centre. 

The foreshore park had been dug up to form the dirt part of the circuit with jumps and troughs ( I haven't heard anyone complaining) after this the riders would emerge out onto the road and race along the foreshore and back. 

When we arrived we were rather dismayed to find the track was still being built so, after a look around at the bikes in their tyre blankets and the usual stands selling motorbike related stuff, we settled ourselves on the hill with a good view from above and waited.....and waited. 
An hour after the advertised start time a series of Norman Collier style announcements rang out which nobody could understand and the organisers were beginning to be in danger of losing their audience who were starting to give up their vantage points and gather around the burger vans in a disgruntled fashion. However, when the bikes finally burst onto the scene everyone forgot their moans and took up their places again to watch, what turned out to be, a fantastic day of racing. 

It was pretty exciting watching the dirt part of the circuit (I am sure there is a proper name for this) but even better when we ventured down trackside on the road. Because it was practice day and not  race day it was easy to get right by the railings and be in amongst the action.

There was a particularly entertaining viewing area where the bikes first emerged from the dirt with muddy tyres onto the road and almost every third rider fell off at the first bend.
The foreshore made a marvellous backdrop to the whole event which was such a success it is now going to be an annual leg of the Asian Championships. To cap it all, the race
on Sunday was won by a local lad from Salamander Bay.

After a crack of dawn start to spot kangaroos we decided over breakfast to move on to our next destination a day earlier than planned as it had become clear that Archie was very interested in rocks and the next stop was the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge, so named because a farmer and his sheep were all killed by a lightning strike there many moons ago.
We drove back through Bourke and stopped for a quick squint at the Darling River. Ian said the rivers in this part of Australia run upside down with their mud on the top and he wasn't kidding, it was completely brown! 

The boys were very impressed with the technology at one of the roadside toilets where, for night time use, drivers have to shine their headlights on a specified spot to reflect and light up the toilets! We pressed on for another couple of hours until we came to Grawin, along a dirt road just outside Lightning Ridge where we had heard there was free camping at the Club in the Scrub.

The club was a splendid collection of ramshackle buildings huddled together with an area for camping at the back. The owners leave the, surprisingly smart, toilets open all the time for any campers to use and were incredibly friendly, as were the customers. The club itself boasts a golf course. There is no grass, just red dirt with flags sticking out of holes every so often, when we asked the owner  if it was an 18 hole course she said, "Yes, they just have to go round it twice!"  

There were posters on display for the upcoming Grawin show which featured fun events like Catch the Greasy Pig and Have Your Picture Taken With Figjam and his Teeth! 

While setting up camp Archie got tangled up with a very spiteful cactus but not nearly as caught up as Eddie managed to get trying to release him. Once Eddie was finally freed we went for something to eat in the pub. The only people around these parts are opal miners, most of whom have very small scale operations, a prospective miner will buy a claim, erect a shack on it, dig a hole and start trying to find his or her fortune.
 The food in the club was good and the customers were all keen to give Archie advice on specking (or noodling) for opals himself. The general public are permitted to rummage around in the huge tip of waste rock the miners dump when they have finished with it and sometimes people make worthwhile discoveries. We were told to look for a blue or black line in the rock called potch which is the substance the opals form in, then to break the rock open and see if there is anything inside.

 Armed with this information we headed off into Lightning Ridge in the morning for a look around, passing Stanley the emu a very impressive Big Thing made of metal and scrap VW Beetles. When we arrived we found there was far too much to fit in to one trip. There are mines open to the public, museums, shops, tours, markets and countless other attractions including The Big Opal (without doubt the most disappointing Big Thing to date)  so we limited ourselves to the market where Archie bought himself some opals, a museum and a driving tour of part of the mining area.

There is a huge open cut mine owned by a big business but it is surrounded by hundreds of little claims where individuals are scrabbling around hoping to get rich, the whole area is pockmarked with holes only big enough for one person to climb down fenced off with very rickety bits of fence - a landscape you would not want to wander around in the dark. The town is also dotted with old cement mixers which are used to clean the dirt and bits of rock off the opals, they are the symbol of the town as you can see in the first picture. 

We drove back to Grawin and stopped off in another pub, the Sheepyard Inn (this tiny area has three pubs all made up of old bits of scrap metal and this one had a railway carriage as a kitchen). The Sheepyard Inn was the centre of  a small huddle of shacks and sheds occupied by speculators, it was quite a cosmic little community and a lot of fun I could see why people might choose this alternative lifestyle if city life became too much or a relationship fell apart.
It was time for us to do some fossicking ourselves so we went to the rock dump and set to. We found a few little bits and Eddie got himself a very promising looking bit of rock with a big blue line all the way through the middle, it turned out only to be potch but it was very exciting all the same. 

We planned an early start as we had a long drive home the next day. As we settled in our tents it started to rain which is a real problem when the only access is a dirt road, not only does it become too slippery to drive on, the locals will not let you because you can mess the road up for them with ruts which will not go away for months. At about 5am it was really raining rather heavily so Ian woke us all up and we threw everything into the car and hightailed it out of there while we still could all soaking wet and still wearing what we had slept in. We finally got home in the mid afternoon after a 2300km round trip adventure.