Bay to Bay: Easter Weekend

We had a nice Easter weekend. My parents returned on Friday from a short trip around NSW and Victoria, and John's sister, Bernadette, came down from Sydney on Saturday. The weather has cooled off a bit and we got some rain on Saturday. Sunday was a beautiful day, however, and in the afternoon we took a drive up to North Durras, a little ways north of here, and did a bush walk along the north side of Durras Lake - beautiful woods, quiet lake, very nice.

Afterwards, we found our way to a place called Big Bit Lookout, on the other side of the highway from Lake Durras, and along some winding, unsealed roads. On the map, these looked like they would be just ordinary unpaved roads, much like the ones all around where we live in Ontario and which are very driveable, but these were rutted, and rocky and some were really steep! We were only averaging 20 km/h, but it was worth it when we got to the top. The maps advertise this lookout as having "Spectacular '360 degree views from Big Bit Lookout including view over Durras Lake" and they were right. I felt like I was on top of the world. There were beautiful forested mountain ranges away inland to the west and we could see Lake Durras and the mouth of the Clyde River to the east.

The descent was very steep - I kept the car in first gear and my foot on the brake - until we got to the main unsealed road out to the highway. We enjoyed a lamb roast on the barbeque with roast vegetables and couscous for our Easter dinner.

On Monday, we were planning on going up to a place called Kangaroo Valley, about 130 km north of here and labelled as Australia's most beautiful valley, so we headed up in two cars - Bernadette was going to go home from there - but we got 50 km out of Batemans Bay and the traffic was just backed up. Eventually, we heard on the radio that the Princes Highway around Kangaroo Valley had traffic jams up to 25 km long. So, we changed our minds, and Bernadette just went on home (taking 7 hours for a usual 4 hour drive), and the rest of us backtracked a bit and went in to Merry Beach (where we had spent Australia Day) and Pretty Beach. The kangaroos didn't disappoint us, there was one field with about 50 in it on our way in, and at Pretty Beach there were at least a dozen in the brush alongside the track down to the beach. I don't think I will tire of seeing kangaroos this year, I could just watch them for ages.