30TH JAN - 7TH FEB

The Blue Mountains
30th - 31st Jan

First thing on the agenda was to visit a supermarket, and the first one we came to was a Woolworths. It seems very strange, but Woolworths are a food supermarket in Ausralia and New Zealand!! A shopping trolley full later and we were back on the road. A piece of dodgy advice meant that we stuck to the “A” road instead of going on the motorway, as we’d been told by the Hertz guy that there were tolls on Aussie motorways - which turned out to be rubbish!! We finally got to the Blue Mountains info centre, and asked about camping in the area. There were Caravan Parks, and National park campgrounds - the latter were very cheap or free, but in a few you had to pay a daily fee for the car as well, so we opted for one of the free ones. This was perhaps not the best move as Hel

had already said the day before that she didn’t feel quite ready for bush camping in the middle of nowhere - which was exactly what this place turned out to be!! It was around 12 km down an unsealed road which took around 45 minutes as it was quite a bad road and we’d got there at about 4 o clock. I was kind of thinking we’d set up camp and then head off to see some of the mountains we’d not caught a glimpse of yet, but the state of the road persuaded us otherwise!! It was still very hot so we went for a bit of a walk, then put the tent up and I got stuck into making our first meal with no camp kitchen!! The peace and quiet was shattered by some guy turning up in a campervan, and proceeding to watch his TV with the volume really loud!! As if that wasn’t bad enough, his chosen viewing was the Christmas episode of Top Gear!! Jeremy Clarkson was not someone we’d have chosen to share the bush with!! Once it went dark though we were both fairly worried about the potential number and variety of