Day 3: a lake, three beaches, and a conference

Can you spot Lake Macquarie in the background?

This day we woke up in a caravan park on the shores of Lake Macquarie. A peaceful caravan park where we only encountered cheerful staff and residents. We're still adjusting to the change to daylight saving that we copped when we crossed the Queensland-New South Wales border on Wednesday (for non-Aussies, Queensland is the only state on the eastern side of Australia not to have daylight saving). The sun got up after 7. It was very weird to wake up at 6 am and find it was still dark!

Cave beach

We packed up and left by 10, and drove a short distance to Cave Beach, where, surprise surprise, there are caves on the beach! Alas the tide was coming in and we could only just get to one of them. The winds were high and the surf pretty fierce, but we walked along the beach for a bit anyway. Then, after it started raining, we hopped back in our vehicle and drove north a short distance, in search of a walk along the shoreline and found another beach (ingeniously called "Coastal") after a short walk through bushland. We then drove to a sheltered spot, read for a bit and made lunch in our portable home. 

Long Reef Headland in Collaroy

Then it was time to face the trip to Sydney. We were surprised by the Pacific Motorway to the north of Sydney. It goes through a lot of uninhabited mountainous area, with large portions of hills blasted away to accommodate the road. I looked it up later (I get travel sick, so I only get away with a minimal amount of reading as a passenger); I think much of the blasting happened in the 1920s, presumably when tunnel technology wasn't really a thing in Australia! In any case, the middle part of our journey was prettier than we'd anticipated.

Lunch in the motorhome

Driving in big cities you don't know is never fun and doing it in a larger vehicle makes it worse. Google Maps is a huge help, but it even got a bit lost at one point and gave us information that didn't match the signs in front of us, so we ended up in a tunnel that took us too far into the city! 

Around 3pm we did stop for caffeine as we got weary, but then powered onwards to the beachside suburb in northern Sydney of Collaroy. We were too early to check in, so we parked and went for a walk up the Long Reef Headland, which afforded beautiful views up and down the coastline, then walked down to the shoreline and back around to where we'd parked, touching the southern end of Fisherman's Beach. I walked a bit more than seven kilometres in the day, which is actually very good considering how tired I felt in the early part of the day!

Dinner was, of course, fish and chips, and then we drove to the conference centre and checked into our room. This is OMF Australia's annual national conference, something we only get to every five years or so. But I'll write more about this next time.