Day 2 on our way to Sydney

Thunderbolts Way

This day we travelled from Uralla to Lake Macquarie (south of Newcastle, near the coast), 355 km. I’ve never travelled in this region before and it’s been delightful.

We took “the road less travelled” from Uralla to the coast: Thunderbolts Way and then Bucketts Way onto the Pacific Highway. It took us through and down the Great Dividing Range. This range is not “great” because it is especially high, although it presented explorers and settlers of this land considerable difficulty when they tried to go west from the east coast. It’s called great because it is so long. It stretches 3,500 km, from the very top of the east coast of Australian mainland to western Victoria on the southern coast. I grew up in Toowoomba on “the range” as it is colloquially known, but that’s only a tiny part of this huge geographical feature. It was fun to drive through a different part of it.

The road we took went through very few towns and those it did were very small (under 3,000). At lunch we stopped at a town, Nowendoc, with 146 people, but the only ones we saw out and about were tourists passing through. We stopped next to an information booth that had some great historical information about the area. It has a long history of agriculture, logging, and even a gold rush.

The road after lunch was windy and up and down, as we made our way towards the plain from a height of over 1,000 m (Uralla). The slopes we drove past were worthy of comparison with Japanese mountains, though obviously not so high. We stopped for a photo at one designated spot (see second photo in this post).

Cambodian street food stall

Afternoon tea was at another small town called Wards River. There were signs outside a small shop across the road that looked like ice cream signs, so we went to investigate. Turns out they were signs for Cambodian street food! The lady who runs it came out of her house next door just to serve us and we didn’t have the heart to say no. So David had a pink milky drink and I had a fried rice-potato-vegetable thingy with sweet sauce.

Probably the least interesting part of the drive was when we joined the Pacific Highway (major highway that follows the coast and links Brisbane to Sydney. They’re doing major roadwork on the highway northwest of Newcastle and we got stuck in traffic. I’ve never been to Newcastle…now I can say I’ve driven near it, but I still haven’t seen it!

Cambodian street
food!

We’re staying in a caravan park near the shores of Lake Macquarie. We didn’t get here too long before dinner and so only got a short walk near the lake. But nearly two dozen ducks joined us as we ate bacon and eggs for dinner under our awning! At the time of writing the first draft of this blog post I was looking forward to getting to bed. It was a couple of long days and I didn’t sleep really well first night, though it was lovely and cosy with the temperature dropping to around 10 degrees early this morning.

Lake Macquarie

Duck friends