Anna Bay

We are finally at Anna Bay! It is situated about 40km north of Newcastle, and like a lot of places we have been, has its own beautiful little beach, nestled in between rocky headlands. The locals seem to have the name of the place a bit confused - you seem to be able to use any of "Port Stephens" (the name of the council, and greater area), "One Mile Beach" (the name of the little suburb, and also the beach), or "Anna Bay" (which is the bay on which One Mile Beach is situated). Take your pick. We choose Anna Bay, because it makes Anna feel special, and we can sing "We're on our way to Anna Bay" to the tune of the Wiggles' classic song "We're on our way to Wiggle Bay". Good reason eh.

Just up the road is a place called Samurai Beach, which while beautiful, seems a bit of an odd name for a beach on the NSW coast. Part of the beach there is apparently a designated nudist beach, so my personal theory is that they call it Samurai Beach because there's always a bunch of guys there swinging their swords around. Not too sure.

The caravan park here is pretty special - big slab sites, plenty of shade, and about 50m walk to the beach. The park has one of the best pools I have ever seen, complete with waterfall and waterslide. The people are also quite helpful - the site we were put on was smack bang between the tap/electricity/sullage supply points, and our water hose and sullage pipes weren't quite long enough to reach. They loaned me a hose extender, although it was normal hose, so we drank rubber-tasting water until I bought some food grade hose yesterday.

We are toying with the idea of staying here 2 weeks instead of 1 - I need to be in Sydney the week after next to do some practical components of my study (which has been sadly neglected lately, although I plan on changing this today). Will be nice to get them out of the way.

Talking of ideas, we are also thinking about seeing if we can split our trip up a little bit. The current thinking is to maybe get back to Brisbane at Easter as planned, and spend 3 months or thereabouts in the region (or within a short distance), then move on to travel north QLD maybe August-December, then travel south and look at South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania (and a bit of New South Wales) early in 2008. The idea of renting somewhere for a few months is made more difficult by the fact that we have all our gear in storage, but we are working on some ideas - will let you all know if/when the idea progresses any further. We have pretty much given up on exploring the Northern Territory and Western Australia on this trip - as much as it really kills me to give up on doing them (they really appeal to my sense of adventure - I really wanted to see Kakadu and Uluru, as well as the Kimberley region), the distances are just too big for us, and having a baby in tow makes long distances just that much more difficult. Next trip maybe. To be honest, those places really ARE ones where we'd be best with a 4 wheel drive anyhow, but it's still got me bummed pretty badly.