Winter Break- Snow and Sand

 Still playing a bit of catch up in our posts. The girls are finishing up a winter break between terms (quarters).  They get a couple of weeks between each term (quarter) with a slightly longer break during the first two semesters. They had a three week break starting the last week in June. A coworker informed me that the private schools tend to get a week off before the public schools, so we were lucky enough to do some travel during the first week, which was technically "shoulder season." 

We started our break by driving a short 45 minutes into the "mountains" for some "snow play." Canberra doesn't get much (any?) snow, but there are mountains nearby where people can go to experience snow. For it to be real snow, you have to drive a couple of hours. We just wanted the kids to be able to do a little sledding, so we didn't drive too far. We went to Corin Forest which is only about 45 minutes away. Closer, but the snow was not at all real. There was a just a small side of the hill that had blown snow on it. It was kind of lame looking, but the girls had a good time.  It was the right amount of a drive for what the kids needed. Here is a picture from that:

On the way back from that we went to Gibraltar Falls. It was a quick detour off the road and a short walk to see a really pretty waterfall.  Obligatory photos from that are here:

 

Next up was a road trip up the coast in search of warmer weather.  The highs in Canberra in late June/early July were usually around 12 C (or the low 50s F). We wanted to drive north some in hopes it would be warm enough to get in the ocean.  It wasn't. But it was definitely warmer than Canberra. We planned this trip basically at the last minute and just asked ourselves, "How far can we drive before we lose our mind?" We settled on no more than 7 hours (which, lets face it, with kids is always more than 7 hours). With not much else to go on than that, we chose to drive to Port Macquarie, which is about 4-5 hours north of Sydney. 

 

This was a reminder about just how BIG Australia really is.  While we were that much further north, we were still hours and hours away from the area where the Great Barrier Reef is. The Great Barrier Reef is all the way up in the area circled in red:

 

So while it was a long drive, we have still seen very, very little of Australia.  

On the way up, we drove all the way through to Port Macquarie in just a day. We stopped for lunch at a place called the Wyong Milk Factory Cafe.  This was about about an hour north of Sydney, probably at about the half-way point in our journey up to Port Macquarie. I'm not entirely sure I would stop here again. The food was only ok. It is just that we aren't so into the way that Australians make hamburgers. They often come off as meatloaf burgers.  So not bad, but not amazing.

The drive up was actually relatively easy (because Mike drove!), and the girls are doing better about not needing to stop every ten minutes, so we made pretty good time. I have to admit, when we first arrived in Port Macquarie, I was a little nervous we had made a mistake, because parts of it looked a little run down. But I'm so happy we went there.  

We went to Port Macquarie in search of beaches to check out.  It was too cold to go in the water and swim (Lauren definitely disagreed with that), but warm enough to explore the beaches. Port Macquarie has no shortage of beaches.  I think there are supposed to be 17 of them there.  We made it to six of them during our stay: Town beach, Shelly Beach, Flynn's Beach, Nobby Beach, Lighthouse Beach, and Oxley Beach. I've marked all six we visited with a star:

Town Beach

Town Beach was located really close to where we were staying.  It was nice to be able to walk over to it.

At the Western edge of the beach is the official start of the Port Macquarie Coastal Walk, which is about 18kms one way. We did not do this walk with the kids, because they would probably have whined most (all?) of the way, but you can easily break the walk up and do it in bits. They really do have very lovely coastline in Port Macquarie. 

We liked this beach because there was a well equipped playground with skate park, a bathroom, and a place for coffee and snacks.  They also have a break wall that provides views of the Hastings river meets the ocean. The break wall is full of painted rocks that began as an art competition in 1995 but are now a sort of outdoor gallery to which anyone can add their touch. It was neat to look at the paintings. They also provide a great place to watch the surfers at town beach, and look for dolphins and whales. Humpback whales migrate past Port Macquarie between May and November. The day we were at the break wall, we saw dolphins playing near the shore, and the splash of whales WAAAAAAAAAAY out in the distance by the horizon. 

Here are some pictures from Town Beach:

Watching the surfers from the break wall (yeet!)

painted rocks at the break wall

Town beach playground

Town Beach Skate Park

Shelly Beach

The second beach we went to was Shelly beach. This was a nice beach that we read was good for families with younger kids, because it is relatively sheltered and has gentle waves.  It would have been perfect if it were warm enough to swim. We had a walk along the beach and then decided to go check out another one.  Here are some pictures from our time at Shelly Beach:

Flynns Beach

Flynns beach is a very short drive from Shelly beach. Both Flynns and Shelly beach are part of the Port Macquarie coastal walk, so in theory it is all walkable too, we just didn't do that.

This was the family's favorite beach. It is nestled between a pair of rocky headlands to the north and south. It has good protection from westerly and southerly winds, which apparently makes it a good place to learn how to surf. We saw some surfing schools working out of this beach.  We liked it because it had a lot of rock formations on the south side of the beach, where the girls spent HOURS exploring and climbing and rock/shell collecting. This was the perfect beach for those times (like the winter) when it is too cold to swim (again, Lauren disagrees). We came here twice just to explore. Another plus for this beach is that it had a great little cafe called the Sandbox basically right on the beach with an amazing view. Mike and I had amazing fish and chips there. It was so good we came back two days later to have them again. The girls had a thickshake (which is what Australians call a milkshake.... when they list a milkshake, it is closer to flavored milk. We don't think their "milkshakes" have any ice cream). Would definitely come back here. I imagine in warmer weather that it could be an absolute zoo, but it was very pleasant during the winter.  We took SO many pictures at this beach it is almost impossible to choose the best ones.  But here are a few:

The girls wanted to take home all the rocks and seashells. We had to compromise, and now I have what feels like hundreds of pictures of rocks and shells on my phone.

Nobby Beach

Nobby beach is right in between Shelly and Flynns beaches. It is a smaller beach and dog friendly. We were only here a short time as we arrived basically as the sun was setting. But it was a beautiful beach I would have liked to have had more time to explore. There was the dog friendly side of the beach, which looked like the official Nobby beach:

Then on the other side of the car park was a beach Mike and the girls walked to despite there being no official path:

Lighthouse Beach

This beach was very close to being my (Shannon's) favorite.  I'm still having a hard time deciding if I liked this one or Flynn's beach better.  They were both so lovely in their own right. We came here very early on Friday morning because I really wanted to watch a sunrise, and I thought going out to the lighthouse would give us a great vantage point to do that. What I did not expect was that it was the PERFECT place to do some humpback whale watching. We got there maybe a smidgen late to see the best of the sunrise, but just in time to see whales passing really close to the shore. And even LUCKIER, right by the lighthouse was a man who's job it was to count migrating whales. He came down and basically gave us a free science lesson about whale spotting and whale migration. It was an absolutely amazing experience and was all the better in that it was totally unexpected. 

I promise there are whales here.  Trying to put in a video below:

 I could have whale watched all morning, but it was cold and the family was hungry.  I found a little cafe less than a five minute drive from the lighthouse called Bittersweet. This has been my very favorite place I've eaten at so far in Australia. Everything we had here was delicious. I'd like to live next door to this place. 

After we had food we went back to lighthouse beach itself and played around for an hour or two. It was a lot of fun and highly recommended. You can also take camel rides on this beach. We were expecting rain the day we were there so we didn't get around to doing it, but there is more than one beach where this is possible in Australia, so I'm sure we will get around to it at some point.

Here are some pictures from our morning at lighthouse beach:

 Oxley Beach

This is the last beach we visited. It was an okay little beach, and the girls had a lot of fun. Lauren basically got soaking wet in all her clothes. We had to hurry back to get her cleaned up and dry.

Other Highlights

Besides seeing beaches, the only other thing we managed to do in Port Macquarie is visit their zoo. Overall the zoo was kind of a depressing zoo - though nicer than the one we saw in Northern Ireland. Most of the exhibit spaces were not very big and something about the zoo made me just a little sad. BUT, two cool things about this zoo were that you could feed the kangaroos and wallabies. AND if you paid extra, you can touch a koala.  You can't pick them up or hold them. The laws on that vary by state, and New South Wales doesn't allow it.  But we were able to touch multiple koalas, which was pretty cool. 

Feeding friends:

 

Meeting Koalas 

He was really suspicious of Lauren's shoes....I'm not saying they are fragrant, but...

After inspecting her shoes, he considered climbing her, but was wrangled by the zookeeper

We decided to split our drive home into two parts and stopped one night in Newcastle, which was roughly halfway between Port Macquarie and Canberra. We had planned to stay in a hotel with a heated pool so maybe the girls could get some swimming in, but nature had other plans. There was so much rain in New South Wales that swimming was out of the question (Lauren disagrees). In fact it was questionable whether we would make it home or get stuck behind the flooding. Thankfully we managed to make it home unaffected by the floods and just dealt with a lot of rain.  We didn't get to see too much of Newcastle, but did try a Mexican street food restaurant that is owned by some people who moved from Southern California. Antojitos was pretty good.  I'm not saying I would drive 5 hours just to eat there, but it is worth a stop if you are near Newcastle. We were able to get tacos with corn tortillas, which are hard to come by here.

The rest of winter break was marred with illness of one kind or another, so we didn't get to do all the things we had planned.  But we did manage to fit in a trip to the Canberra Zoo and a workshop at Canberra's Glassworks where the girls got to make some art with glass.