Sometimes when you travel around nothing seems to go right no matter how well you plan. At others, you manage to land on your feet even though you've done everything wrong.

We left Swansea on the inland New England highway rather than the more scenic and coastal road because the recent storms had washed away parts of the latter route. It was pretty tedious and slow going for much of the way. We hardly seemed to crawl across the map, which was a big contrast to New Zealand where progress seemed much more rapid. We passed through many British place names such as Newcastle, Tamworth, Warwick, Wallsend, Aberdeen and Scone.

The weather for the first part of the trip was miserable cloud and rain, but this changed when we reached the Great Dividing Range. Then the sun shone and the sky turned blue as we climbed the hills onto the plateau of the northern New South Wales tableland.

Due to a lack of foresight and misjudging the distances involved, we found ourselves in the small town of Guyra not long before dusk. Luckily, there was a caravan park so we went in to ask how much it would be for a tent site. The guy behind the desk looked at us a bit askance. "It's a bit fresh outside," he said. "You sure you want to be in a tent? How about a cabin?"

He told us it would be $15 for a tent or $60 for a cabin and after a little hesitation to consider the meaning of the word "fresh" we said we would stick with the tent. The guy must have taken pity on us because he gave us a third option - putting our mattress and sleeping bags down in the communal room next to the kitchen as no-one else would be using it - for the same price as the tent. This sounded a bit dubious, but he offered to show us the room so we stepped outside to go to have a look.

The very short walk to the communal room made us realise what a bad idea the tent would have been. "Fresh" is obviously Australian for "bloody freezing". We told him that we hadn't realised how cold it was when we stepped out of the car and he explained that we were about 4,000 feet up - as high as some of the NSW ski fields - and that Guyra regularly gets snow in the winter (which was officially just two days away). The caravan park is apparently the highest in the country.

We were half convinced to take the third option in any case, but when we saw the communal room we immediately said yes. Inside there was a wood-burner and a supply of logs - Katy was in heaven!

I carted loads of our gear inside while Katy resumed the 'firestarter' role which she had adopted in Agistri. She soon had a blazing fire going and the room was lovely and warm. The décor was 'interesting' in that the walls were bare plasterboard on which previous guests had scrawled various comments and drawn pictures - graffiti with a purpose.

After a quick dinner consisting of our 'cheesy beano 'standby (potatoes and baked beans with cheese sprinkled over the top), we crawled into our sleeping bags and fell asleep to the light of the dying fire. An excellent result and far, far better than our fate would have been had we stuck to the tent option when we would probably have suffered frostbite!

Richard