Boxing day, we loaded up the Family Truckster, picked up Dan and headed on a mini road trip. Kate's family had rented a vacation house on the beach in Hawk's Nest, about 2.5 hours north of Sydney. Her family was awesome - we arrived in the middle of a game of trivial pursuit and were split up onto their teams. Trivia from the 80s already wasn't my strong suit, but trivia from Australia in the 80s was even more difficult! Still, it was fun and they fed us a great dinner. It was a rainy night so we had planned to stay the night there. The rental house was huge and had lots of room for us. The next morning, we had a big breakfast and Kate's Dad took us on a tour of the area and we checked out the surf at the beach. We played a big family game of Cranium (my fave) and then John, Mark and I headed on our way. We took a little driving tour of the Myall Lakes area before driving to Anna Bay.

When we got to the beach in Anna Bay, John decreased the pressure in his tires and we headed into the 4x4 only section of the beach. We bopped and spun through the dunes until we found a perfect spot to make camp. The weather all around us looked ominous and the wind was howling but we powered through anyway. Eventually, the sun peaked through and we had a beautiful evening. John's friend Tim joined us in his 4x4 jeep just before sunset. We fired up the grill and made some tasty chicken and potatoes. After digging out a big hole we made a good fire and spent the night hanging by the fire. The night sky was great out in the middle of the dunes.

With the sun rising quickly in the morning, we were up out of the tent fairly early. After a simple breakfast, we headed out for a tour of the dunes. We found a steep spot to try out sandboarding and then went for a tour of the whole beach area. Overall it was an awesome spot to explore and camp out. Flying up and down huge dunes in a 4-wheel drive truck was great - some of the dunes were steep enough that we had trouble getting to the top. We checked out a shipwreck on the beach and took a quick dip in the huge surf. This beach is a known breeding ground for sharks and has the highest concentration anywhere in the world - about one shark for every 800m of beach! But they left us alone, as expected. We spent most of the rest of the day just relaxing at camp, but did head into Anna Bay to grab some essentials, as well as a pub dinner.

The weather kept going our way and after a somewhat mixed cloudy day, the night sky cleared again to give us some great stars. We had a big campfire (and makeshift smores - marshmallows melted on Tim Tams!) with driftwood the boys collected on the beach but had a pretty early night.

This morning, we woke up early with the sun and set to pack up our camp. It is amazing when camping in the dunes, well essentially a desert, how sand can get EVERYWHERE. In your clothes, caked to your sunscreened skin, in your ears, in your food...everywhere. And the poor Truckster has definitely taken the brunt of it; it's like a mini desert in there!

We arrived back in Sydney early this afternoon and set about unpacking and de-sanding ourselves and our gear. We headed to Bondi tonight to check out a Canadian pub called the Stuffed Beaver. We heard they had Caesars and good home-food and we weren't dissappointed. We each had a huge ceasar to go with chicken wings, poutine and caesar salad. It was an interesting taste of home complete with world juniors hockey playing on the tvs.