Ok, two days to go. We’re heading back to the coast today, to do some surfing and fishing. The storm front that blew us off the beach earlier in the week has broken up.
After leaving Goulburn we take a winding route through the Southern Highlands via Bundenoon, Moss Vale, Fitzroy Falls and the Kangaroo Valley. This would have to be one of the best drives in southern NSW.
We come out at Berry and make our way to Seven Mile Beach. I’ve always liked this beach - its sweeping curve seems to go on forever. There’s no 4WD-ing on it, so we park near a walking track that leads to the beach.
It’s one of those steely gray days where the water and the sky almost merge. The waves are small but perfect, and the boys run in with their boards.
We leave them to it and go for a long beach walk. Jillian is a serious walker whereas I get distracted by beach flotsam, so I have to keep catching up. A couple of hours later we’re back, and I join the boys with my bodyboard. Rohan is in his zone and getting some nice rides, Dylan and I have fun on our shark biscuits. The water’s warm, the air isn’t. We catch waves until we get cold.
We drive back to Berry then up to Woodhill Mountain to stay with some friends. Their view looks out to sea and south to the Shoalhaven River and the coastline beyond – where we’re going fishing tomorrow. We light a fire and open a red.
Saturday. Day 8.
The forecast for today mentioned freshening westerly winds. Freshening?? By the time we’re on the road it’s howling down from the mountains.
We drive south. After Nowra, the satnav takes us off the highway and along some back roads to the coast. We follow a track through the bush as far as it goes, then take a walking track. We come out on to one of the south coast’s most beautiful and isolated beaches, Currarong Beach.
We all go for a beach walk and watch the surf and the rips. The wind has swung to the north-west, so there’s not much protection from it now.
Back in the car and on to the little village of Currarong on the Beecroft Peninsula. We’ve heard the fish have a good attitude around here and there’s plenty of them. (There are also some good bushwalks nearby in Abrahams Bosom Reserve.)
We rig up the beach rods and head north along the beach, looking for gutters. The wind is over 30 knots now and we’re getting sandblasted. Intelligent people would give up at this point, but we’ve come this far…
Rohan spots some gutters and we work them for a while, using pilchards on ganged hooks. Then we try a rocky outcrop further up the beach and try pilchards and lures. Rohan thinks he’s had a hit and he brings in half a pilchard, but it might’ve been kelp.
We hang in for a while, but cyclone fishing is not huge fun. We have to face it. This is a No Fish Trip. Not the first time, not the last.
So we scrape the sand off and re-pack the Pajero for the last time, and head for Sydney. A few more DVDs, a sprinkling of CDs and a diversion along the coast road from Wollongong to Stanwell Park help make it a cruisy drive. Just after dark, we’re home. The tripmeter says 1818 kilometres.
Postscript
We did the apres-trip stuff the next day. Unpacking the car, we concluded we could have taken a bit less. It’s the same on boat trips - pack the minimum you think you need, then take out half of it.
You can certainly fit a lot in the car though. It’s a 7-seater but the seats in the back fold into the floor out of the way. We liked the swinging rear door because it makes loading easy, but you have to open it carefully if you’re parked on a hill (ask Jillian).
We vacuumed the sand and dirt out, got Dylan to do a food search (or the Mitsubishi people would have got some nasty surprises) and went to a carwash to get the dried mud off.
We calculated our fuel consumption for the trip was about 10.5 litres per 100km. That’s with a full load, the extra drag from the roofracks and kayak, the beach driving, and a lot of hills, so we thought it was pretty good for a car with this amount of power.
We were keen to see what it’s like as a family car around town, so Mitsubishi let us keep it for a few more days. Jillian and I took it in turns to have it for the day.
We were used to the car so we enjoyed driving it in Sydney as much as we did on the trip. We liked the visibility in traffic, the number of kids you can take in it after sport, the satnav (you get hooked on it) and the audio system. And the reversing camera. It used more diesel around town of course, and it needed more parking space than our own cars. All up, after a few days it felt like our family car.
And what did we think of the trip?
It was great, we loved it. The weather was dire most of the way but we had a wonderful time, and we would have liked to keep going a few more days. But there was work…school…
We’ve seen a different way to go on holiday, whether you like the beach or the bush or both. It means any holiday or weekend can be more of a getaway, you can go to more places, or take the most interesting route to get there. And it’s not just where the car can take you, 4WD-ing in itself is a lot of fun.
Obviously we were limited by the weather, and we didn’t go too far off-road because it was our first time. But if we went again tomorrow we’d do a lot more, especially if we had a car with capabilities like this one. It was chosen as 4WD of the year by Overlander and 4X4 Australia magazines, so it’s clearly the full enchilada from a serious offroader’s point of view.
From our point of view as first timers, the car does so much for you it makes it easy. But you can’t take it for granted and you have to stay switched on all the time – that was one of the key points on the training course.
We’ve been thinking about some of the places we’d like to go, including the sand islands in Queensland when we’re more experienced. Having been around Moreton Island by boat, we can imagine what it would be like by 4WD. And then there’s Fraser.
In the meantime we’re reading the travel stories on this website and we’ve bought a few maps. Apparently it’s quite a big country.
