Reflections on Emerald Beach/Coffs Harbour

Well we can't believe it's been over a week since we got here, but we are moving on tomorrow. We are off to South West Rocks, which looks like a beautiful spot. A reasonably short trip at 185km, which is pretty good in our books!

We really like Coffs Harbour, as mentioned previously. It really feels like somewhere you could live happily.

I had the pleasure on Saturday night of attending an RC car race meet here in Coffs. I hooked up with an old friend/associate from the Harris RC days, who runs the club from his motorbike wrecking shop on the industrial side of town. It was a small but excellent meeting - you could not hope to meet a nicer bunch of folks to race with. The track is awesome too - it kind of follows the space that he's got to play with, but it has plenty of great sections, including a brutal steep uphill left-right-left at the end of the main straight. Danny even loaned me a car, so I got to have a race too! The only problem was that it made me realise how much I miss RC racing while we're on the road. Still, was an excellent night.

I took a walk along the breakwater at Coffs today, across to Muttonbird Island. Unsurprisingly, this island is home to a massive colony of muttonbirds, which nest there between September and March. The island is quite high, and the views were simply amazing. On the western side you look over the marina and the rest of Coffs, on the southern side you have the entrance to the harbour and the southern breakwater (see picture), on the northern side you look up the beautiful local beaches towards where we're staying, and on the eastern side, you have a really steep drop down to a rocky shoreline, which looks out across the most amazingly dark blue bit of ocean you've ever seen. Beautiful.

The other cool thing that happened today was a Tractor Ride. The caravan park here puts them on for the kids once a week, so Grace (with mum in tow) got a nice ride behind the gardener's tractor. She seemed to enjoy it a lot!


We have spent most of this evening packing up the annex and the inside of the van, so we can have a reasonably easy time of things tomorrow morning before we leave. I'm still not 100% sure this is the easiest way of going about things, but it does have a couple of BIG advantages - firstly that all the big jobs can be done while Grace is asleep, and secondly that we don't have to get up at the crack of dawn in order to have everything done by the time we have to be out of whatever caravan park we're in (usually 10am-ish). It takes a surprising amount of time to pack down and get yourself and all your gear ready to move in a caravan - longer than you'd think.