Thursday, September 17, 2009

Wingham to The Entrance via Forster & Newcastle

After a reasonable night at the 4-star motel at the golf club (the trains woke me, but not Karen), we had a look around. This is the pond where the frogs could be heard.

We made our way back to The Scrub, and did the walk around the flying fox nusrery. There were loads of them!
Occasionally one would take flight. Besides the screeching and squabbling, their flapping was quite loud too.
Instead of taking the Pacific Highway all the way, we diverted to the coast road that goes between the coast and the lakes. We stopped for lunch in Forster, a very pretty town. The long bridge goes over the estuary. The waters were an amazing azure.
The coastal route was reasonably quiet and very picturesque, and it also went up and down into the rainforest in areas. This was at one of the stops near a boat ramp allowing access onto the lake.
The remainder of the trip to The Entrance was unremakable, except to the idiot in the 4WD on the way into Newcastle. This completely put us off stopping at this too-large, too busy, too smelly, too expensive, generally unattractive city. Sorry to to the Newcastrians, that's how I see it.
Instead, we pressed on  a bit further, looking at Swansea, but the affordable accomodation was full.
We ended up in The Entrance, a town that appears to be very geared for the summer crowds. Fortunately, that's not 'now', and the place is quite nice. We had dinner in the hotel "entrance" (that's its name, not the foyer) which was probably one of the cheapest meals we've had for a while, but was still very good. A quick wander around town followed dinner (find somewhere for breakfast!)
We're staying at a motel in North Entrance, just on the other side of the bridge to the main town. It's not flash, but is seems quite adequate.
So all in all, a nice day with some lovely scenery and a pretty drive, and the benefit of being quite a bit closer to Sydney than originally planned for tomorrow's drive. Now we need to find some accomodation there that we can afford.

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