We made it to airlie beach a day ahead of schedule. The roads are pretty long strait and flat once you get going. Made it easy to make good time.
We found a place to stay right on the beach, and this will give us a few days to organize our stuff and check out Airlie before we get the ferry over to start work on Monday.
Nice little town, has a great little farmers market on Saturdays.
We mostly just walked around and looked around. We had to repack everything and also get groceries before we went, we had so much stuff as we headed to the ferry… hope they let us on with it all!!!
We stayed at a rest area not far from the caves and were up and going before 6am. Needless to say these caves don’t get a lot of visitors at normal hours and at 6am we had the place to ourselves.
I really enjoyed this little walk, the weather and erosion patterns on the rock were fantastic. Two of the caves were blocked off, as one had marks in the rock from Aboriginal art carvings, and the other tool sharpening marks. I am amazed that they managed to remain there after several thousand years. I crawled through from one cave to another, that was fun. I also got some great photos.
After the caves it was back to the road. We had a great driving day and we didn’t really stop again till dark. Long day…
Yesterday Grace and I just walked around the town of Mudgee, not a lot going on, just a nice little town. We went in some cute little shops, just browsing, it was a fun way to spend the morning. We also went to both the op shops here and managed to find a few things. I found another scategories game, so I looked inside to see if this one still had its die, it did so I bought it, to go with the one I bought a few months ago with out the die. Lol I now know to look inside every time.
There was supposedly this amazing pizza place we had to try, but they weren’t open, so we decided to make homemade pizza for everyone. Grace’s uncle is also here visiting. The pizza was a big hit along with the homemade garlic bread. After dinner we played one game of settlers and then a game of scategories. It was a good time, it has been a lot of fun playing games with more than just Grace and I. Lol
Got up and had breakfast with everyone before we headed north again. I made breakfast burritos, we got out of Mudgee a bit later than I planned but that’s how it goes. We weren’t going to far, three hours north to Coonabarabran. More specifically Warrumbungles National Park. We arrived about two thirty and had to get going if we were going to make it back before dark. The hike was nice seen the breadknife and some wildlife. I got pictures of kangaroos up close, and even a koala!!! The lady working the visitors center also told us about these caves about an hour away that are worth seeing, so we decided to find a place to stay and check em out in the morning.
On our way out from the park back to town we stopped at this observatory in this guys yard, he runs a telescope show at 7pm every night. I convinced Grace to come with me. We went into town and got dinner (cereal and ice cream… sorry mom lol), then headed back out to the observatory. It was fantastic, a bit chilly and Grace was really cold, but I had a blast. We got to look through a 20 inch telescope and see Saturne, Neptune and Uranus. As well as some nebuli? Not sure on the plural of that… I even got to take some pictures of the stars and the moon. Good times!!!
