According to the man in my life I need to demonstrate my prowess with roughing it, he does not believe that l like camping.  Equally I don’t see any proof from his side that less then five star hotels are acceptable so a short road trip from Melbourne to Sydney turned into an opportunity to show off our camping skills to each other.  An opportunity to demonstrate our ability to ‘get grotty’, before we get into some more in-depth planning for a potential motor bike trip around Europe next Spring.

We were meant to leave at 0730, drop the boys off at the kennels and then drive along the coast road from Melbourne to Sydney… we left at 0945.  It wasn’t my fault, instead of packing the car the evening before we drank wine and wrapped presents, but eventually everything and everyone was loaded into the car and we were off.  The paddocks around the Bellarine are yellow already, the big round hay bales sit under the sun.

By 1230 we were through Melbourne and out the other side but we were not off to a great start.  Instead of a nice little country cafe / pub for lunch it was a build your own burger in Dandenong, I haven’t been to Macca’s for ages and since when have they started doing chips and gravy!!! Genius.

We were aiming for Batemans Bay but soon realised that we were not going to get close and Eden was looking good, a grand total of 625kms for the day through Gippsland visiting Warragul, Traralgon, Sale and Bairnsdale to Orbost and then across the border to NSW.   It was about Orbost that the car dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree and started telling us we had no park brake or controlled hill descent and a transmission failure!!!  Checking on google it seemed that no-one on Range Rover forums was terrible concerned about these warning lights and so there seemed no reason to pause in our journey so we ignored the flashing lights and proceeded.

Arriving in beautiful Eden around 7pm, just in time to pitch the tent and watch the sunset.

We had a new tent, sleeping mats, head torches, a little gas stove and Will had even bought a shower bag!!!  Surprisingly putting up the tent was easy, the sleeping mats are self inflating so we threw them into the tent chucked the bedding on top and we were ready to crack a bottle of red.  This is when the first camping lesson occurred…

Lesson One – Do not use a sharp knife to cut salami on top of a shower bag…

Lesson Two occurred about 8 hours later

Lesson Two – self inflating sleeping mats do require blowing up…

It was two very stiff and sore people who emerged from the tent at 5.30 the next morning.  The sleeping mats did not inflate and we spent the night doing pressure area care every hour instead of sleeping.

Apart from the pressure area care, another very odd thing happened overnight, about 3 am our car started to communicate with the mother ship.  Making all sorts of odd creaking, groaning and electronic handbrake noises for about 15 minutes.  When we turned it on in the morning it was all fixed… Got to love a car with personality and self diagnostics.

We very proudly made ourselves coffee and breakfast, we survived a night in a tent all was well.  Planning for Europe on motorbike in Spring 2018 can commence.

The drive from Eden to Mollymook is stunning, green paddocks full of fat cows, hinterlands and stunning white beaches.  The weather was perfect, we were on real-estate.com virtually the entire way imagining a move to a vibrant coastal town.  We bought cherries, passionfruit, apricots and nectarines from road side stalls and arrived at Rick Steins, Bannisters restaurant for lunch 10 minutes early.

The restaurant was beautiful, perched on a cliff looking over white beaches, rocky headlands and blue water.  Sitting on the verandah eating seafood, life was feeling pretty fine.

This camping thing is great, $20 on a beachfront campsite then you feel totally justified spending crazy money on a crayfish lunch at Rick Steins… I think we must do it more!!  BTW, the car lit up like a Christmas tree again as we left the restaurant, hopefully it will get us home 🙂