Emerald Beach

Since Sunday we have been camped at Emerald Beach Holiday Park. The town of Emerald Beach is about 15km North of Coffs Harbour, and is a sleepy little place about 500m off the Pacific Highway, which boasts its own corner shop, video store, nail salon, massage therapist, four star restaurant, and financial planner - along with some of the prettiest beaches of the North Coast (see picture). The caravan park itself is really nice and shady, and has a great feel about it. They have lots of cool things here - a nice pool (saltwater, solar heated in winter), games room, massive jumping pillow (which has been deflated since the day after we played on it - coincidence?), and a nice quiet natural setting. The grounds sit just behind the sand dunes which line the beach, so you get the constant sound of waves crashing on the beach in the background. To get to the beach, you walk about 100m down a sandy track, and you're smack bang in the middle of Emerald Beach itself. Very nice indeed.

Last night just after dusk, we were visited by a couple of wild kangaroos, who decided to feed on the grass about 6 feet from the front of our annex. Although we've both seen 'roos at the zoo and hopping along by the side of the highway, we were still impressed to see them lazily picking their way through the park, completely ignoring the fact we were so close. I was tempted to try and get some photos, but being reasonably dark, I didn't want to freak them out with a camera flash.

Grace has, in the last few days, got at least 2 new teeth through, and as such has been very grisly. The poor thing - I dread to think how painful it is, and considering she's too young to understand, it must be quite traumatic. Still, she's a great tooth brusher, so I'm hoping she ends up with better teeth than her old man does!

The other impressive thing that has happened this week is the addition of an awning coming out from the front of our annex - this shall now be referred to as "the beer tent" (for obvious reasons). It's great on those hot days to sit under canvas instead of inside the annex - the annex's walls tend to block a lot of airflow, even with the windows wide open. The beer tent doesn't, however, give you any kind of protection from your toddler wandering off and having an explore when she feels like it. Ups and downs, swings and roundabouts...

Coffs Harbour seems like a great place to us - big enough to have all the things you need to live comfortably (all the major shops, airport serviced by the major airlines, hospital, schools, public transport, etc), yet small enough to feel like you're not part of the rat race of the big city. It's also very beautiful, with lots of walks to go on, and plenty of things to explore and look at. We like it a lot.

Reflections on Iluka

It seems hardly believable, but our week at Iluka has come to an end. It's really gone quickly.

Iluka prides itself on having the best fishing for miles around, but I think the fishing might have been on the slide (and no, I don't base that on my own inability to catch a fish, however tempting that might be). We took a drive to the local fish co-op the other day, which is situated where al the local trawlers dock, and is well renowned for having the best fish for miles around. When we got there, there were only 5 types of fish available. 2 types of perch, flathead, whiting, and flake/shark. Only the flathead and whiting were locally caught - the perch came from Queensland and Vietnam (!!) respectively, and the flake came from Victoria. This seemed really odd to me, that the local fishing industry, can't catch enough fish to supply the local co-op. Is the local industry fished out? Or is the co-op just crap these days? Who can tell, but I was disappointed I can tell you. On the upside, I got me some local prawns which, while small, were pretty good.

I went for a walk by myself yesterday to get away from everyone/everything for a couple of hours and get some exercise into me. I ended up walking the Iluka World Heritage Rainforest Walk - 2.5km of bush track through the rainforest just behind the dunes. It was really nice, and although I didn't see much in the way of wildlife, the sounds and the smells of the rainforest are truly unique. While it's not as lush as your typical rainforest, it's unique in that it's so close to the beach, and as such has different plants and animals to most other forests around the place. At the end of the walk, you end up at Iluka Bluff (shown in picture) which is a really interesting rock formation at the headland. From the top you can see for miles in all directions - definitely worth the climb.



From there I decided to walk along the beach back to the rock wall (the entrance to the Clarence river, with Yamba on the other side), which is around 4km. This was awesome - not another soul on the beach for the entire journey, a nice wide beach to walk along, the wind and waves to your left, the beach, dunes and rainforest on your right, and really soft, fine grained sand underneath your feet. Although I haven't walked that far for a long time, it was a real highlight for me. Although I'm not a big beach swimmer, I love the ocean - there's something so primitive and wild about it.

Grace has been sleeping better lately, but last night was an exception. She woke at 4.30am and simply would not go back to sleep - so I resorted to the "driving bub to sleep" trick. We went and explored Maclean, which is a beautiful little town just down the highway. It's situated on the broadwater - a wide part of the river that's really pretty. The town was apparently founded by Scottish immigrants, and they hold onto that heritage fiercely - all the town's telegraph poles are painted in different tartan designs of all the different clans, and many of the shops are Scottish in some way or another. Ever wondered where to buy haggis? Wonder no more. Anyhow, Grace just about got to sleep in the car as we got to Maclean, when something woke her, and she didn't get back to sleep at all - so we had what turned out to be a nice drive at dawn, just the two of us. It was sweet, but I really would have preferred to do it when I was more awake :)

We have enjoyed staying here at Iluka, but are looking forward to heading on to Emerald Beach tomorrow. Emerald Beach is just out of Coffs Harbour. It's about a 2 hour drive at our travel speed, so no massive journeys this time around. Hooray!

A lesson learned and a baby settled.

I feel that God has been so faithful to me this week and he used my friend, Maya to call me back to Him. I have been having so much trouble settling Grace. I was getting quite desperate as day after day, night after night, it was taking over an hour to get her to sleep for naps / bed. I wanted to give up, but the thought of more hours of an awake (and grizzly overtired) baby was motivation to keep trying.
 
I knew Grace’s routine had been shot to pieces – what with the house move and staying at other people’s places over Christmas, not to mention the new environment of the van. I was doing my absolute best to reintroduce some kind of routine eg. Nap times, feed times, and bath times. She was still proving difficult to settle. I was using Tizzie’s techniques (www.saveoursleep.com.au) but they weren’t working. It was Maya’s advice that did. She explained how she has to get herself in the right frame of mind when she puts her boys to sleep. She has to decide to be calm and relaxed.
 
Later, as she was leaving, Maya gave Grace a sleep blessing. Why didn’t I think to stop and pray and ask God to help put Grace to sleep? I’ve been so absorbed in all my hassles (and there are thousands of them) that I didn’t think to rely on my faith. I feel like a fool. It was that faith that brought Grace to life in the first place!!!
 
So, duly chastised, I decided to pray for her each time I put her into the cot for a sleep. I asked God to give her sleep quickly. I asked that He would be her security and there it was, spelled out in the Bible verses book we read each night at bedtime, a promise for safety and rest. So we went to bed with a prayer and a decision that I would sing a song of praise as I put her to sleep
 
I also decided, rather than Tizzie’s approach (which would work in a safer environment like home) I needed to just hold Grace until she fell asleep. More than anything right now, she needed to know she was safe. She needed to know that although the world was changing all around her, I was still there holding her as she went to sleep. And more than that, I needed to know that the Lord was still here holding me as my world changes. This is not like a holiday where you go home and everything returns to normal. We have no home to go to at the end of this trip. We travel from this trip into a new life and we have no idea what that life will look like or even if we’ll be able to afford it.
 
After three or four days of praying and singing and cuddling, Grace is beginning to settle more quickly. I’m relieved and grateful – both to Maya for her wise advice and to God for his faithfulness.

The Fish That Got Away...

I went fishing last night for the first time in probably 10 years. The caravan park we're at has a little jetty directly opposite the entrance, which juts out into the mighty Clarence river. Well, "mighty" is a relative term - it's nice and wide, but even at high tide, I believe you could walk 95% of the way across without getting wet over your waist. Obviously the channel is wide, but it's certainly not deep. It'd be about 300m wide where we are I reckon.

I am not much of a fisherman. I like the *idea* of fishing (sitting quietly, watching to world go by, waiting for the possibility of a big fish hitting your line) but have never been that mad keen. I always liked going fishing with my dad and/or brother and/or mates when I was younger, but somehow it's just not been an important part of my life recently.

Cutting a long story short, I got a nice rod and reel combo for Christmas this year (very practical and nice idea, given we're travelling) so I set about catching a fish. Off I toddled at about 10.30pm last night, onto the pier. High tide about 11.15pm, I figured I'd fish either side of the high tide, just like my dad taught me. It took me all of about 3 seconds to realise that I forgot the insect repellant, and I counted 14 (no, really) mosquitoes on one leg. After a quick trip back to the van (100 metres away) I went back to hook me a big fish. I had my little el-cheapo foldy-uppy chair, a bucket, my tackle box (also part of the present), my packet of prawn bait, and my torch.

I got no bites for half an hour or so (apart form the mosquitoes, who had an amazing ability to find any square millimetre of flesh not slathered in repellant - but they don't count), then after feeling something nibbling at my bait, I hooked my first fish on my first strike, on the first cast of my new rod. Most impresive, I thought. I reeled it in, and got it onto the jetty. At this point of time, my panic/amazement/unco-ness got the better of me, and I managed to break the chair when I jumped up to my feet. This sent me flat on my ass, rod in hand, fish flapping in the breeze, and the chair ended up a mangled mess on the ground. I jumped to my feet, kicking the chair to one side, at which point the fish jumped off the hook, and started flapping on the pier. This fish was obviously trained in some kind of survival skills, since it headed straight for the cover of the now defunct chair. I ripped the chair out of the way, just in time to see Mr. Fish flip neatly into the gap between the boards which made up the walkway of the pier, and with a gentle "plop", he was back to his mates, off to swim another day.

I figure I have 2 consolations - firstly, it was only a small fish - a 15ish centimetre Bream, and I would have thrown it back anyhow. I really would have liked to have been the one who chose to throw it back though - not sure what that says about me and/or my personality. I would have been seriously cranky if it was pan-sized, I can tell you. Secondly, I'm lucky they don't have security video on the pier - or maybe unlucky, as I'm sure my performance - although unplanned - would do well on the funniest home video show.

Fishing. It's a way of life.

Welcome to Illuka, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Well, we've been here in Iluka for a couple of days. This too, is one of my childhood haunts. I didn't set out to make this a nostalgia trip, but it just seemed to be the next logical destination when we worked out our travel times etc. The other option, Evans Head, would have been a few kilometres closer to Kyogle, but in the end I figured it would be nice to see how the town had changed in the thirty odd years since I learned to ride a bike and roller skate there. [sigh] My dad had a big curly head of hair and a fluffy bushy beard and mustache back then. He was like a wild man of Borneo from the shoulders up.

Kyogle was a busy set of ten days so I didn't get to post particularly often. Even now, writing anything about it would feel like old news. When I studied journalism, one of the first things my lecturer said was "Yesterday's news stinks. That's why they use it to wrap up old prawn heads." So Kyogle was lovely, we met up with Maya, Nanna, Maybelle, and a whole bunch of friends from my old church. But now we're in Illuka.

Illuka is pretty and the Clarence River (at least the lower reaches up as far as Maclean - that's all I've seen) is positively majestic. Driving alongside vast expanses of still blue rippling water is just delicious. I would love to get out there in a little dinghy and just putt around in it. There are plenty of boats floating around in the safety of the Iluka Bay. It is a man-made bay set just inside the Iluka - Yamba bar. The town is just as pretty as I remember. The beer garden at the pub, The Sergers Reef Hotel, has the best view in town.

Grace has been difficult to settle. The reasons are obvious. The challenge now is to deal with it. I need to try and implement (and stick to) an appropriate sleep routine for her. This needs to be fairly rock solid before I go introducing something as challenging as toilet training. [sigh] I knew the work of motherhood wouldn't stop while we were on this trip and this just proves it. In a way, the work of motherhood has just been knocked up a notch because now we're not doing it in a safe and predictable environment. Grace doesn't feel safe, she doesn't know what's coming next. [Did she ever?] She would suck that dummy all day long if we let her.

I'll tell you more about Iluka tomorrow.

Cheers.

Potty Training Lesson 1

One of the first things your mummy taught you when you were toilet training was to go to the toilet very often. For the first few weeks of your toileting life you were stuck on the potty every 20 minutes or so until it was second nature for you. Bear this in mind when you are caravanning.

Our site at Kyogle Gardens Caravan Park is just about as far away from the amenities (ie. toilets) as you can get. As a result I have found myself both consciously and unconsciously thinking, "I can't bear the thought of a ten minute round trip right now, I'll just hold on a little longer". If you add to that a toddler with their own crazy needs and demands, then it becomes a recipe for,..... [drumroll]........ bladder infection.

Take my advice and just do the frickin' walk to the toilet! Oh, and if they give you a choice of sites, take the one closest to the amenities block.

As for Grace, she has just begun the first stages of pre-potty training. This is where she is desensitised to the potty and it becomes a part of her every day life. As a result, we have a tommy the tortoise potty sitting in the annex with the toys. Also in the first phase of this exercise is a potty training DVD. Stay tuned to hear if the DVD was a success.

Also on the topic of potty training, I wonder if I will ever master the slightly creepy "She-wee", a special funnel designed so that women can pee standing up and with their clothes on like men do. Why does this idea seem so wrong?

Rotten daylight savings!!!

Queenslanders routinely have the argument about whether we should go to daylight savings during summer or not. Personally, I think it's a huge inconvenience and I don't see why we should bother going through the trauma of it. OK, people like to be able to go walking outside late after work etc, blah blah blah. But other people, namely mothers, have to go through the trauma of either a) altering their baby's sleep, feed and nap routines or b) altering their entire life to fit around their baby's old routines redubbed into a new schedule.

I'm sure some mums just jolt their kids into the new time frames with reckless abandon,... and I probably would too if I were working and needed to fit in with the rest of the planet. But the reality is that your kids do have a say in this and Grace is still functioning on Queensland time ie. an hour behind New South Wales time. This means that we win a sleep-in in the mornings and we lose our washing up time in the evenings.

When visiting family and friends here in Kyogle, I have to keep reminding myself what timeframe I'm working on. How annoying.

Vote no to daylight savings. It's a pain in the proverbial. And while you're at it, campaign the government to get the eastern states into alignment with their time zones.

Reflections On Kyogle...

Well our time at Kyogle has almost come to an end. We are leaving Sunday to go to Iluka, and are staying at the Anchorage Holiday Park. The place seems nice from what we can work out, so let's hope it's as good as it looks.

Kyogle is a pretty little place, but the caravan park is old and a bit run down. I think Anna gets a little depressed that her old hometown has been let go a little bit - maybe it has, maybe it's a perception thing (everything always seems so big and great when you're a kid, right?). It constantly amazes me - as a city kid - how she can say "oh Mr Smith used to live there", or "The Jones's used to live there - I went to School with the youngest of them 2 years behind me". I think it's something of a country town thing - everybody seems to know everybody else. It's simultaneously kinda nice and a little disturbing if you ask me.

Anyhow, it's been nice catching up with Anna's Nan - she is old and frail nowadays sadly. It's also been great catching up with a few of Anna's old friends (Hi Maya, Pascal, Aidan, Ollie!) but it's now time to hit the road again.

Grace has not been sleeping well at all - really fighting sleep both for her daytime naps and her night time sleeps. It's putting a lot of  pressure on Anna and I - we're both tired and cranky, and all those things that come with parenthood. Grace has always been such a good little sleeper that I think it's surprised us more than anything. She is getting used to her new surroundings in the caravan and the annex, but she needs a little more time I think. Today, for the first time ever, I had to take her for a drive to get her to sleep (for those non-parents, the gentle movement of the car puts kids to sleep - or maybe it's being in the same enclosed space as dad - or his boring choice of CD - who knows). I'm told by my mum and dad that they used to have to take a drive with me quite regularly to get me to sleep when I was a kid. I'll wager they're smiling right now and thinking "see what you put us through??".

Anna's mum and dad are here this evening, sleeping in the annexe. It's nice to see them, they're down to spend a bit more time with us before we head too far way from home base. They head home tomorrow afternoon, and we're leaving the day after that.

One thing I have to get used to for this trip is not having the luxury of convenient trading hours for shops. My suggestion last night around 7pm of "just nip down to the late night chemist for some nappies because we just ran out" was met with howls of laughter. _I_ didn't know the chemist only opened 9-5 (and 9-12 on Saturday). Where I come from, shops are open convenient hours!  Same opening hours of the only supermarket in town - tough biscuits if you want to pick up something after midday on Saturday. It's strange, but I vaguely recall as a (very) small child having to get somewhere before midday on Saturday before the shops shut - but that's got to be close to 30 years ago (who looks old now?). it's just something that I had purged from my memory, something you just don't have to think about as a city dweller these days. They do things a bit different in the country folks - but who's to say it's a bad thing? You just have to be a bit more organised to achieve what you had planned.

The trip down from Burpengary to Kyogle.

Travelling with the caravan attached to the back of our car is a lot slower than either of us had anticipated. We knew this from our Rockhampton trip,... but a 2.5 or 3 hour trip to Kyogle turned into a full day's drive with the van on the back.

For months I have been freaking out about driving to Kyogle via the Mount Lindesay Highway. It is the windiest bendiest narrowest nastiest most nausea-inducing stretch of road I have ever been on in my life! The thought of taking a caravan down there was just overwhelming. It was almost as stupid as Scott's plans to drive the van along the Great Ocean Road. [sigh] The only reason we took the Mount Lindesay Highway in the end was because my cousin Allen (a dude whose opinion we highly respect, especially with regard to driving and cars) had said that the road had been widened and he thought it would be OK to take a van down there.

Getting from Burpengary to a servo on the highway to Boondall on the Gateway Motorway took us an hour. One hour! It was at that point I knew we were going to get to Kyogle much later than the GPS estimated.

It was a really pretty drive. Once you get past Beaudesert and into the hills there are pretty houses, rustic sheds, birds, cows and a thousand picture perfect postcard scenes. It almost hurt me to see so much beauty and not be able to record it in some way. When I go on drives like that I wish I was a photographer. I think this trip will be hard for me to deal with, in that I will want to record it all in some way. I know I will be grieving for the stuff I can't quite capture. I know I'm a writer and that's what I do, but somehow it doesn't do it justice. This kind of beauty seems to need a higher art form, maybe poetry. Short sharp notes scratched in a tiny notebook as we rumble past at the speed of Commodore-with-16ft-van-attached seem barely sufficient. Beauty should be absorbed, contemplated, breathed in,... not glanced sideways through car windows and recounted in a blog. How lowbrow is that?

We arrived at the Kyogle Gardens Caravan Park at 4:30pm or 5:30pm daylight savings time.

It's On!

Well today is the start of our "real" adventure - after 2 weeks or so with our families (which has been awesome incidentally), it's time to get out and on the road. Although we're both really tired, it's great to be finally underway on this adventure!

We're in Kyogle (Anna's hometown) for the next 10 days or so. I am horribly behind in my studies and need to do a month's work in the next 4 days to make sure I don't miss my submission deadline. Fun fun fun - that takes care of what I should do for the next few days anyhow :-) We chose to come here since we have a few good friends here, and Anna's Nan is really sick and frail - we want to spend some time with her and hopefully make her feel a little better. Give her a bit of Grace-time.

Our site is nice and shady but a little muddy away from the concrete slab - we got the choice of shady but no grass, or sunny with grass (easy choice). It's been raining here, so the lack of grass tends to make the ground a sodden mess in places. Might be interesting trying to keep the place clean for an extended time, but seems manageable for the moment.

The trip here from Brisbane was fine, but I must say the Mount Lindsay Highway is somewhat akin to a goat track in places (and strangely beautifully maintained in others). No problems with the car this time (went like a dream - whew) and the annex went up this time without a hitch. I worked out many things I did wrong last time, and it's so much better this time round - it looks like it did when the awning guy put it up. Hooray!

The plan is to head out to Iluka at the end of our time here. I want to catch me a fish...

Camping With Family Over Christmas

Our one week trip to Kinka Beach was a kind of pre-Christmas test run. We certainly appreciated finding out a bit more about our van and our annexe. Mid-week we decided the awesome 6 foot foldable table I bought on sale for $59 was just too big. It seemed to take up ALL the play space and living space in the annexe. Instead, we've gone for an aluminium card table that folds down into the size of a suitcase. It's incredibly light, but ironically cost almost as much at the huge table ie. $50. It wobbles a lot, but it fits perfectly and the annex feels like a lovely place to be. I'll try and post a photo of it some time soon. I'm a little technically challenged this week WRT camera.

We've had a couple of weeks staying with our relatives in Brisbane. When staying with The Harrises, we sleep in our caravan in their front yard. The power is hooked up so we can use our lights and air-conditioner. It feels just like an extra bedroom on their house. It's nice staying like that because all our gear is still just where we put it inside the van. There's no suitcases, there's no "where the hell did I put the baby wipes?" etc. That said, you're still staying at someone else's house and so the bathroom trips usually involves a queue - Hmmm. Sounds just like the caravan park, really.

When staying with the Rosses, we sleep in my old bedroom. It's a huge room in a huge five bedroom Queenslander. Thankfully it's airconditioned and there is even an ensuite which, although it is only half constructed, has a toilet handy for those midnight visits. Poor old mum has been running herself ragged after all of us and little Gracey-goo. Grace is just energy on a stick. She is an uncoiled spring. She has to run around every corner of the house and climb up and down on every single chair before she will slow down and consider a nice quiet cuddle or two.

Sometimes I find myself crying, moved emotionally because Grace is just so precious. I wonder if I feel more grateful than other mums do because of what I went through to become one. If that's the case, then I'm glad I went through eight years of fertility treatment because she is just so very very precious. So very very beautiful.