America Bay

Yes - it has been a while...

I know I am very behind in blogging, but I've finally managed to catch up a bit. We have had a few trips away recently - if you scroll down a bit you'll be able to read the posts in order. They are mostly just my favourite photos :)

Today happened to be a beautifully, mild Autumn Day (after a couple of weeks of freezing weather). So we escaped into the outdoors and took a drive up into Kuringai. The photos are from a short walk to America Bay Falls - one of the many walking tracks on West Head.

Tweed Heads

Just to keep things even, we also managed a trip up to Tweed Heads.

Kidding - we were intending to go up at Easter but with our weekend cut short and flights being expensive, we took advantage of some cheaper tickets a few weekends later (which also happily happened to be the Mother's Day weekend).

In addition to the obligatory trips to the beach, we also drove out to Springbrook to do some walking in the National Park. Again - plenty of water to photograph :)

The Farm

Unfortunately, the BT had a bit of an accident. Let's just say that battery acid really should stay inside the battery... We had being trying to fix it for about a week, but the Sydney forecast was rain, rain and rain. So we decided to take it somewhere sunny instead :)

The damage wasn't as bad as feared - mostly just affecting the battery plate and the bracket underneath. Poor BT :(

We went for a bit of a drive with my Mum and Dad - with the excuse of finding a couple of geocaches. One was out in the middle of nowhere (along the road to Condobolin) where a bunch of artists had set up a dozen or so utes in a paddock by the road - all transformed into works of art. It was actually a really good display, but I'm not sure that you would find it without already knowing about it.

Otherwise, I'll let the photos do the talking (picked some of my favourites).

Chichester State Forest

Although our Easter long weekend wasn't quite as long as most (work of course), we still had three days off and decided it was high time we tried out the (not-so-new) Turbo Tent. So we loaded up the BT once again and headed up to Chichester State Forest.

The Forest is located at the southern end of the Barrington Tops National Park (inland from Newcastle). It seems like a very old forest - full of huge, buttress-rooted trees and everything covered in moss. It also happened to be very popular - our intended 4WD-only camping spot was packed full of other long-weekenders. We ended up driving through most of the forest, checking out every camp-ground, before we finally found an empty corner for our tent.

Having said that, most other campers seemed content to lounge around their fires drinking beer, so we found that when we ventured out on a couple of walks, we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

As you can see, there was plenty of water to play around photographing...

On the first night, as the fire was burning low and we were contemplating bed, we were surprised by a couple of paddy wagons, which pulled up into the campground and pretty much surrounded our site (like there was no escape...). Four cops jumped out and huddled together - we thought they must be doing random checks or drug tests or something. Just as we were starting to get a bit nervous, they pulled out an esky and came over to ask us if they could share our fire. Turns out they were doing 24hr patrols all weekend because of trouble in previous years (like cars driving through tents), and that we had the quietest campsite in the forest - an ideal spot in their opinion to have a bit of dinner :)

Oh - and the Turbo Tent was great.