I must start the blog today with a bit of tragic news. Sometime during the day I dropped our brand new camera and it bounced off a rock and into the ocean. We managed to fish it out and dry it out and amazingly got it working again but there is a crack in the middle of the lens. We have been enjoying this camera so much and bought it just for this trip. We decided to try and use Lesley's camera, while ok, it is not quite the Nikon Coolpix. We have located another Nikon at a store that is an hour and a half from here and on our way to our next stop. It is of course twice as much as the original because everything in Australia is super expensive. We are going to suck it up and get a new one.

On to better news. In spite of the camera fiasco we had a good road trip day. We drove close to 500K North to Raleigh. We stopped in a town called Laurieton for lunch. We went to a park on the bay that had a boat launch at it. We selected a picnic table and got out our esky (Australian for cooler) and started to unpack our lunch. Within two minutes we had several pelicans swimming towards us. They were wondering if we were cleaning fish and going to give them our scraps. They were very disappointed to find us eating sandwiches and carrot sticks.

A fishing boat did come in and start cleaning fish towards the end of our lunch. The pelicans actually got out of the water and begged for scraps. They are quite impressive when you are standing two feet from them.

A lot of the drive was like being on an expressway in America. The trees and the birds are different but the scenery was similar. Eric and I had a good time reading the names of the towns along the way. We passed Budgewoi, Cooranbong, Bulahdelah, Kalateenee, Dondingalong, Bellimbopinni and many more fun places to say. We also had a brief wild koala sighting in a eucalyptus tree top.

At around 4pm Lesley started craving a cuppa (Australian for a cup of tea) so we stopped in Nambucca Heads for a tea and to go for a walk along the boardwalk. In Town where we had coffee and tea there was a cool mosaic wall that wrapped around a corner house. We walked around it and admired the detail. Then we drove down to the beach. The boardwalk retaining wall rocks here have all been painted by families and tourists and are quite a sight to see. At the end of the boardwalk was a sandy beach with tidal pools and cool rock formations. This is where the great camera incident occurred. We did get some cool pictures before the drop.

We had only another 30 minutes to go to get to Johnny’s house where we are spending a couple of nights. We arrived just in time for happy hour. Johnny has 90 acres and about 35 head of cattle. We all jumped into Johnny’s truck and toured the property and fed the cows. We enjoyed a beautiful sunset and headed back to the house for dinner.