Day 121 – Hunter Valley to the Coast, Australia

June 7th, 2019

We spent another night car camping, and woke up to have another cup of noodles and PB &J.  Brendan’s Dad and Kathy generously gave us a week in their timeshare condo, and we picked a resort on Australia’s East Coast.  Our plan is to travel up the east coast while we are here and get to the Great Barrier Reef for scuba diving.  Our week in the timeshare starts tomorrow in Coffs Harbor so we ae extremely excited for a bed, a shower, and even a washer and dryer in our unit!  We said goodbye to Wollombi and spent the first half of the day doing a few more tastings.  Not wine though, as Hunter Valley also has cheese, salumi, and chocolate shops!  We stopped for cheese and I asked Brendan to stop at a cider house for cider tasting. 

We left this region early afternoon and made our way back to the coast.  We stopped in Newcastle and had a nice walk to break up the driving. 

We then stayed along the coastline and went to another free camp spot I found online.  It was a beautiful drive and we stopped several times for pictures. 

This next free camp spot was right on the way to Coffs Harbor.  Because I knew we could check into the resort tomorrow, we toughed it out for one more night sleeping in the car.  This camp spot was also next to a tavern and they asked us to buy a beer in order to camp for free.  Seemed like a pretty easy request so we did that and got another kick at how all the locals talk.  When we asked the bartender about the amenities of the camp site, he quickly said “oh sure” and yelled to another waitress “Hey, show these blokes where the shithouse is, will ya!”.  After we were shown the shithouse, we made our way back to the car and watched another downloaded movie before we tried to get comfortable enough for sleep one more time.