The journey home from Melbourne started with a detour to Sunbury to pick Monty up from the kennels. He was mysteriously fluffy and sweet smelling, I am hoping that a bath was just part of the service they offer and not necessitated by something dreadful Monty had done. 
We drove back across the Macedon Ranges to the Hume Highway and plumped for Oxley as a place to spend the night. Oxley is very near Glenrowan, the site of Ned Kelly's last stand, and sits on the banks of the King River. 

We have been choosing our free or very cheap overnight stopping places on line and this was an example of one that was not quite as advertised. The online post had told us we could free camp on the riverside at the Stan Allen Reserve (they always have names like this and are usually down the road from the Bert Pickles Bridge and the Fred Pratt Memorial Bowling Green). When we found the reserve we were greeted with a large No Overnight Camping sign which pointed out that we could camp at the Oxley Recreation Ground. This was a kilometre or so away from the town centre and not within walking distance of the pub which was not a problem for us because we had supplies with us, but would have been a bit of a nuisance if we were relying on the pub for our dinner. I am sure you are thinking, 'what was to stop you driving back?' and the answer is, you do not always want to leave your caravan unattended at a free camp.
The recreation ground turned out to be fine however, with several other caravans staying overnight too. It was a little irritating that the shiny, new toilet block was locked while the, clean but very grotty and old toilets were open for our use because there was a $10 honesty box charge for staying there and, while you grin and bear creepy toilets if you are not paying, I for one expect something in return for my ten bucks.
However, there was entertainment in the form of a little showjumping ring where a constant stream of riders turned up to practice so we had our own little gymkhana to watch.
We spent a pleasant night and found out the following morning that we could have reached a section of the riverbank within the recreation ground and camped there but we will know for next time.
Back on the road again we detoured through Rutherglen which is a beautiful little wine region and passed by Murdering Hut Creek and Police Paddocks Road (goodness knows what went on there!) We were looking to stop in Belangalo State Forest for the next night but could not find it on any maps even though it is pretty big. It was the site of several murders by serial killer Ivan Milat and it seems to have been renamed, a bit like 10, Rillington Place. As we didn't know what it had been renamed as, we stopped at Gunning as we had on the way down, instead. 

 Once home, we were cooking some sausages on our balcony when some very cheeky kookaburras turned up. We fed them a couple of bits of bacon, which was a mistake as now we can't leave anything unattended on the barbecue. If you look closely at the picture you will see they had brought two of their mates as back up!

 The next stop on our journey down to Melbourne was Jingellic. To get there we drove down to Gundegai where we joined the Snowy Mountains Highway, we love this route which takes us through Batlow and the apple growing country. The landscape is usually very green on this trip but, even this high up, it has been a very long, hot, dry summer so we drove past mile after mile of brown fields and paddocks broken up by huge lush green apple orchards covered in gauze. I thought this was to keep the bugs out but apparently it is to shade the fruit from the harsh sun. It is hard to believe that snow falls not far from here in winter. 
After passing through Tumbarumba we reached our destination for the next couple of nights. We have stayed in Jingellic before and, although it is a bit of a detour from our route, it is well worth it. The camping is free with the pub on one side of the camp area and the Murray River on the other. It was very busy in the evenings but emptied out during the day as caravanners moved on only to be replaced by a new set of Grey Nomads the following evening. The Grey Nomads are a huge community of retirees who have sold their homes and spend their lives on the road spending their childrens' inheritances and we see them everywhere. They seem to vanish during school holidays (many of them do house and pet sitting duties) then they reappear as soon as the kids go back to school. They are very proud of their Grey Nomad status and often have statements on the back of their vans like 'Bruce and Darleen. Adventure Before Dementia.'
 We spent two days in Jingellic and did pretty much nothing but read and paddle in the Murray, it was great. It was so beautiful I could have stayed for much longer but there was a purpose to our journey so we had to press on. The next job was to drop Monty at the kennels we had booked. This was in Sunbury and took us into Melbourne a different way, across the Macedon Ranges which were massive, undulating plains (brown again). Sunbury itself was a funny place, it is just a commutable distance from the city and there are endless new estates being built. All the new builds are huge McMansions as they are known in Australia, supposed to show wealth by sheer size alone, taste does not appear to come into it. 

Anyway, we arrived at Shaun and Zoe's and managed to park the caravan outside much to the horror of some of the neighbours, and the next day met up with Shaun's parents at the Avalon Air Show. 

 The air show was sensational, I had expected the flying displays to go on for about an hour then the rest of the time to be spent looking at planes but no, the flying went on for the entire duration of the show. It was staggeringly impressive, I can't begin to say what I enjoyed the most during the daytime it was that good. However, there was a real highlight when darkness fell.
We had seen a glider being towed up at dusk and forgotten about it when suddenly it lit up in the night sky. It was covered in LED lights and performed a beautiful balletic dance perfectly matched to music while shooting fireworks out of the ends of its wings until it reached the ground, unbelievable! You will have to take my word for it because I couldn't get a decent photo.
Next day was the engagement party which was a huge success. Congratulations Zoe and Shaun! 

 We hit the road again a couple of weeks ago on our way to Zoe and Shaun's engagement party in Melbourne. It is about 1100km to Melbourne from Port Stephens so we decided to make a bit of a road trip of it.
Our caravan is set up to enable us to free camp so we did a bit of research and picked out some likely spots to spend the night on the journey. These free camps are usually either country pubs which allow people to pitch up out the back and use the loos in return for the purchase of a couple of beers or a meal, or small towns that recognise allowing free camping will bring a bit of much needed business into the area. 

We had chosen Gunning as a potential stopover as it is right by the Hume Highway which is the freeway linking Sydney and Melbourne so off we set. The first part of the trip usually gets extremely tedious around Sydney where a connecting motorway tunnel seems to be taking an age to complete. At the moment traffic whizzes down the Pacific Highway then grinds nose to tail around residential streets to the north of the city before joining the freeway again. It must be awful for the people who live there as well as being dangerous, we often hear on the news that a lorry has lost control and ploughed into a front garden so the sooner the tunnel is finished the better for all concerned.

 It was not too bad today however and we made pretty good time, arriving at Gunning in the late afternoon. It is always a good idea to have a couple of alternative stopping places in mind when choosing a town for the first time as they are not always quite as advertised but Gunning was fine. The free camping spot was the recreation ground (home of the Gunning Roos rugby team - or football as they call it here) and there were about 6 other caravans already there. It was also home to a group of Crimson Rosellas, a new bird for me to tick off in my book. 

Gunning is a good example of a small town that has been left for dead by the construction of the new motorway. The old Hume Highway passed through the centre of the town bringing business to cafes, hotels, pubs and shops but now the road bypasses Gunning so the town council have been very forward thinking in encouraging visitors by offering a free place to stop. We had dinner in the pub, where they do a cheap special every night (tonight's was $10 schnitzel) and almost all the other caravanners were in there eating too, and it was the same with the coffee shop the next morning.

 Like many Australian country towns, Gunning has beautiful old buildings. The garage was my favourite closely followed by a tiny museum which had a notice on the door giving a phone number to call if we wanted to look around. Gunning also has something I am starting to learn to expect in every small town - a mysterious art shop that never opens but has strange artwork inside when you peer through the windows. This one had various pieces made of milk cartons and old broadsheet newspapers (?) 

 Back at the recreation ground we saw a sight which demonstrated how an Australian man will always find a use for a ute, this time for exercising his horses!

 Since we moved into this house, most of our time has been spent working on the outside and hopefully you can see from the before and after photos that it has come on a bit. I have been concentrating on developing a garden while Ian has focused on making the place easier to get around.

 Our block is like the foothills of the Himalayas and he has just completed a fourth flight of steps just to reach the top of the back garden from the house while I am starting from the bottom making a path which will eventually reach them.

 We try to use recycled materials as much as possible and were delighted to find over 1000 second hand pavers for the path on Gumtree for a fraction of the retail price. Although the monetary saving was huge, we have only just started to recover from the aching muscles gained from four 76km round trips loading and unloading what felt like millions of pavers. We started the whole exercise at 8am and finished unloading the final car and trailer full at 7pm - truly knackered. 

We never learn though and have decided now to embark on our most ambitious project to date - to fill in the underside of the house with an extra lounge, bedroom, shower and toilet, laundry, office and workshop. It is common in Australia to build a pole house like ours when dealing with a steep slope as it is the cheapest method and makes the most of any views but you can see from the pictures the area underneath is huge and wasted at the moment. So we are resurrecting Bodgit and Scarper Builders and jumping in feet first!

 The architect came last week to draw the plans and a surveyor arrived to take lots of mysterious measurements on Saturday so we can obtain planning permission. Ian has to take an online Owner/Builder's qualification and, once the development approval arrives, off we go. 

Hopefully this will all come together so we can do the bulk of the work in winter for a change, we usually forget to take this into account and do all the heavy work while sweltering in the summer heat like proper pommies to the amusement of our neighbours.

 The weather has been on everyone's minds here at the moment because, in some areas, we are experiencing the hottest summer for 120 years. If you thought the British were obsessed with talking about the weather you should come and hear the Australians!
Unlike the British however, Australians are expected to be experts. There are no helpful little clouds, suns and lightning bolts on our weather forecasts to aid our understanding. We are expected to know all about el nino and are battered with meteorological terms like trops, lows, highs and radar maps which look very pretty but are tricky to decipher without some formal training.
Conversations in the supermarket or petrol station all start with references to the heat/cold/rain and everyone has an opinion on what is going to happen next. 'There is a cool change coming' - 'I can feel a storm approaching'. In spite of all this expertise, the whole country is taken completely by surprise by sudden weather events on a surprisingly regular basis! 

To be fair, we do have some big weather here. No drizzle or light breezes for us, if there is wind or rain, it is proper wind or rain. At the moment inland areas of New South Wales are struggling along in over 40 degree temperatures while, in the Northern Territory, some communities are cut off by flooding.

 The series of incredibly hot days was expected to come to a head on Sunday with the biggest worry being fire. Fire is in the back of the minds of all Australians in the summer months and every town has designated safe areas which are usually big open spaces away from trees and buildings. There are other concerns too when it is this hot it is important to keep hydrated and to do as little as possible. Our local swimming pool sent text messages and put up facebook posts saying they would stay open until 8pm each evening until the heatwave ended but most people choose to stay indoors with the air conditioning on full blast. This then places huge pressure on the power supply and, if there is a fire, power is needed to work water pumps because the water pressure drops as soon as every household switches on their hoses at once. A dilemma, I am sure you will agree. The New South Wales government dealt with this by ordering that Tomago Aluminium switched off their smelter during the hottest hours for 3 consecutive days. The smelter uses a staggering 10% of NSW power! 

 The fire danger, which usually hovers around moderate to high at this time of year, was predicted to be catastrophic in our area (Hunter on the map). Everyone in the areas expected to be affected received a series of text messages telling us to be ready to take action or evacuate, we were also called on our landlines. Although this was obviously a helpful strategy in many ways, it threw some elderly people living alone into a panic thinking they had to evacuate straight away. Added to this the NSW fire chief appeared on the news on Saturday night with a very scary speech about how Sunday was expected to bring the most catasrophic conditions seen in living memory, which did leave us thinking we were all going to die! 
I am in two minds about the warnings because most fires are started deliberately and I think it gives people ideas, indeed two men have already been arrested this weekend for setting fires on purpose, they were 32 and 40 years old - not kids! However, the reason for all the warnings was, added to the extreme heat, there were very strong winds due to arrive in the late afternoon which is the worst possible combination for the firefighters.
Unfortunately the predictions came true with 97 fires burning at one point across the state. The little township of Uarby was almost completely destroyed. At one point the firefighters were battling in 47 degree heat against 90km per hour winds and 75% of the houses along with much of the livestock were lost. 

There were no fires near us this time although we could smell one which was about 40km away, but we were again reminded how brave our firefighters are. They are almost all volunteers and it is thanks to them that, yet again, no human lives were lost. I'll leave you with some pix of our local firies with the cakes a couple of little boys made for them. 

 Another 6am start, this time to meet up with Zoe and Shaun on the Clyde Coast. They had borrowed Shaun's Mum's motorhome and originally planned to drive up to Byron Bay then stop with us on their way back. However, by the time they reached Bateman's Bay they realised this would be taking on a bit too much driving and asked us to meet them instead.
This gave us one day to book a caravan park which accepted dogs in the busiest week of the year on one of the most popular stretches of coast in the country. Not much of a challenge there then!
Unfortunately, even if the sites had availability and were listed as dog friendly, they generally won't take dogs in the peak holiday season and the kennels were not an option as we were trying to do all of this on a Sunday and they were closed. 

Amazingly, after about ten rejections, we hit lucky with the Kioloa Beach Caravan Park who not only had two pitches available but welcomed dogs with open arms.
We were anticipating a dreadful journey as nearly all Australians are on holiday around this period but it was plain sailing all the way to Milton, which was less than 50km from our destination. Milton is a very pretty little town on the Princes Highway which creates a huge bottleneck during the holiday season, I imagine it can't be much fun to stay there because every time you ventured out of the town you would have to join the hour long queue to get back in again. Anyway we got through and eventually arrived at Kioloa Beach (nobody knows how to pronounce it, even the locals don't seem to agree).
The Clyde Coast is fascinating. If you follow the link you will see that the locals are very proud to have no McDonalds, KFC, poker machines, cinemas, 5 star hotels, betting shops or big supermarkets. It was great, very refreshing. Internet was non existent and it was only possible to get a phone signal if you stood on the boat ramp or by the 50km sign on the road out of Kioloa but this all added to the fun.

 The campsite was very busy but had plenty of shower blocks, a large pool and was surprisingly quiet at night with kangaroos and wombats moving into the site after dark. Once we had met up with Zoe and Shaun we went to explore and found it was situated on a fabulous beach. This whole stretch of coast turned out to be a series of glorious, dog friendly beaches. 

We had a wonderful few days walking in the woods, where we stumbled across kangaroos and goannas, wandering along the beach, and chilling by the pool. The campsite even put on a dog show including a dog fancy dress competition (the dog in the picture is not Monty). Eventually we said our goodbyes and Zoe and Shaun headed south for home while we wandered north on our way back.
The journey home took us through Robertson, home of the Big Potato and Moss Vale where we stopped for the night at the showground. Moss Vale obviously used to be nice but it is now in two halves. One end of town is well kept with lovely buildings while the other looks very down at heel.

 There were many empty shops and it turned out to be impossible to find anywhere to eat so we cooked back at the caravan and left the following morning. As we drove through the neighbouring town of Bowral (birthplace of Don Bradman) we could see where the money previously spent in Moss Vale was going. It was an extremely prosperous looking place, maybe we will stay there next time, I'm sure Ian would like to visit the Don Bradman Museum.

 We had a brief stint at home, long enough to fulfill our duties at the Tilligerry Habitat and to discover this little chap had vandalised our bird box and moved in! He is a Brush Tailed Possum and we have heard him munching at the hole but didn't really think he would be able to make it big enough to get inside. The box is at eye level with our front door and the possum is driving Monty crazy every evening.
We hit the road again at the crack of dawn to visit our friends in Mount Warrigal, south of Sydney. After the, now traditonal, stop for a bacon and egg McMuffin we had a pretty good run down to Wollongong, about four hours which is better than expected when towing a caravan at the height of the holiday season. 

Most of the trip was motorway so the change in countryside came as a bit of a surprise when we took the Wollongong turn off. The road took us down the, alarmingly steep, Illawarra Escarpment which was surrounded by landscape that could be mistaken for the Sussex South Downs. It was beautiful and very hilly all around as we descended to huge Lake Illawarra. Our friend's house is in a lovely setting looking over the lake itself which is in turn, on a fabulous stretch of coast.
We went for lunch at the wonderful Gerroa Fishermens Club which served possibly the best fish and chips I have ever tasted and has a view to die for of Seven Mile Beach. This was followed by a trip to Kiama, a little north back towards Wollongong where we inspected the Blowhole, a hole in the rocks where spray shoots out when the surf is up. The sea was pretty quiet while we were there so it didn't perform its party piece but we got the idea, there was a fantastic ocean pool though. 

Next morning we were taken high up to Jamberoo which is a good spot to get a proper perspective on the area. From there it was just like looking over English fields of cows and trees and we got an idea of just how big Lake Illawarra is. It really is a glorious part of the country.
We had brought the van because we wanted to do a stop off on the way back at St. Albans, across the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. We have both just read the book The Secret River, recommended to us by Zoe. It is based on the Hawkesbury around the area of Wiseman's Ferry and I wanted to have a look. We arrived in the town and eagerly headed for the pub which was originally the home of Wiseman and features in the book.

Unfortunately the staff were so rude there we did not stay to look around. I have never said this before in my blog about anywhere but...don't bother to visit the pub in Wiseman's Ferry!
It was a shame because the area is staggeringly beautiful, the ferry crosses the river where there are huge, tree covered cliffs on both sides with very pricey houses dotted around, it is extremely difficult to take a decent photo because the cliffs are so steep but, take my word for it, the place is gorgeous.
We boarded the ferry for the short trip across the river then made our way along the winding roads to St.Albans. After pulling over opposite The Settlers Arms we enquired in the pub if it was ok to free camp opposite and the response could not have been more friendly.

 The barman told us that settlers had been camping there for 200 years and we had as much right to as they did. What fun!
The campsite was a stretch of green on the banks of the river with toilets and running water, all free. 

St.Albans itself is a quiet, lush green little town with peacocks and chickens strolling around, it is commuting distance from Sydney so property prices are high and the pub get surprisingly busy in the evenings. We will come here again, it's a very special little place.