campervan

After four days in Sydney, it was time to hit the road. Unexpectedly, Aaron and Catherine were cool enough and spontaneous enough to rent a campervan themselves and embark with us on a wonderful journey down Australia's southern east coast. Our tentative goal was to get down to Melbourne or beyond. We almost made it, traveling as far south as Wilson's Promontory, the southern-most part of continental Australia, and an excellent national park!! Along the way, we had some interesting adventures, threw the disk for many hours, and saw lots of the crazy animals for which this country is known.

We stopped at this beach to run around the morning after our first night on the road. These cliffs were very strange. The pitcure does not do justice to the dark red color.

Here's a typical example of the southern coastline. A very striking difference from the heavily touristed beaches of the Gold and Sunshine Coasts up north. Similar to the difference between Northern and Southern California coastlines.

One of the best nights of the trip! We were at the town of Lakes Entrance (clever name), and we took a dinner ferry cruise. A cool Aussie bloke took us by boat to a crazy winery and restaurant in the hills where we ate and drank ourselves silly with excellent meals and vino. I think Aaron's beer was sour in this shot.

Vanning it at Wilson's Promontory. We spent a couple nights in this great park, going to the beach, hiking through a rainforest, and climbing a mountain. We had wombats rumbling through the campsite and cheeky parrots eating our apples. We also had a strange Aussie neighbor who played the didgeridoo for our evening entertainment. Here's Evan making breakie - egg scramble with avacado on toast. Yumm!

On our return trip back to Sydney, we took a wild and crazy route from the backwards town of Buchan to the ski town of Jindabyne. Here's a view of the country we traversed on a wild, rocky, bumpy one lane dirt road for many hours. It was a tiring but very cool drive. Thank god the campervans held up.

Ahhh, the end of a tough day boating and fishing on Lake Jindabyne. We spent a couple of nights here at Australia's "premier" ski town, camping at a great illegal spot next to the lake. "Sorry officer, we didn't see the sign."

A dramatic shot of the brand-new national capitol building at Canberra. We took a great tour of the building and were extremely impressed with all the colors and details that went into the construction. Canberra gets a bad rap as a city to visit, but it is actually very picturesque with many nice parks and interesting architecure.