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Pete and Lou's Big Adventure
We've arrived in Sydney after a 5 day road trip from Melbourne. After a good hour trying to find the right road out of Melbourne we headed up Princes Highway to our first stop - Lakes Entrance....home to 90 Mile Beach.
About 3 hours later we arrived at Riviera Backpackers which was lovely but a bit stuck in the 80's, much like the little "towns" that we passed through on our way here. Lakes Entrance is a typical Australian holiday town, full of camping parks, hotels and hostels. It must be something to do with the 90 mile beach of white sand and blue ocean. The nicest part of this town is its picturesque location on the gentle waters of the Cunninghame Arm with bobbing fishing boats backed by sand dunes.
The following day we jumped back in the car for a 3 and a half hour journey to Merimbula. On our way we passed through numerous national parks of rainforest. We felt like we were in the middle of nowhere and on a rollercoaster - mainly due to the numerous mountains we seemed to be crossing!! Every so often we passed either a house or a farm...talk about living in the middle of nowhere! We also passed through many coastal towns with gorgeous views of bays and cliffs, one of which was Eden. The most exciting part for us though was crossing the border from Victoria into New South Wales - how geeky are we?!?!
Reaching Merimbula we noticed we noticed it was a busier town than Leakes Entrance. Like Lakes Entrance, Merimbula is a fishing town so there are many places to sample the fresh seafood - shame neither of us can stand it!! We headed to our accomodation at the local YHA hostel. After dropping our bags and a quick shower we strolled down to the beach - AGAIN! The next day we spent the morning window shopping and did buy the Gorillaz album for the car as Oz radio is just as bad as Oz tv! We had a picnic on the beach and continued to our next stop - Batemans Bay.
This part of the journey wasn't great as Lou felt rough the whole way, probably due to the hilly and windey roads - (not because of my driving of course!). We arrived in Batemans Bay and it was so hot and muggy we could hardly breathe - too hot too go too the beach believe it or not. So,we treated outrselves to an upmarket hotel with spa, pool and free movie channels and spent the evening relaxing.
Feeling refreshed we headed to our final stop before Sydney - Wollongong. This student town is home to fifteen surf beaches. We found some accmodation in a really old house with high ceilings and creeky floor boards. We parked around the back on a dirt track to dump our bags before going back out. Lou waited out front while i moved the car back onto the road. Well on my way down the driveway the BIGGEST, the HARRIEST, the most UGLIEST SPIDER crawled up the dash board to greet me. Lets say that i moved quite quickly into the passengers seat and out of the door. Lou looked at me like an idiot until she saw the spider herself. Imagine the scene too english people absolutely s***ing themselves, dancing around a car with the doors wide open which is now half way across the pavement and road! It too a kind old OZ women with my thong in her hand to knock the spider onto the road and save us from anymore embarassment!!!! Neither of us wanted to get back into that car!!
Anyway we walked around Wollongong's town, beaches, harbour and lighthouse. We finished the day with fish and chips and conversation after conversation about the spider and spiders generally. We then had an early night before our early but final drive to Sydney.
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