Heading west again
Thursday, 15 April 2021
On our only full day in Hardy's Bay, I worked in the morning while the kids slept in and Jon did the crossword. After lunch we all went out to various walk sections of the Boudi Coastal Trail. I was keen to walk the full 10km of it, but everyone else was satisfied with 5k. Luckily for us, Shirley was tolerant of our wishes and dropped us off in different places to make our way back to the shack. Over the next 2 hours I had a lovely time listening to podcasts and enjoying the views. We had well deserved pizza for dinner then were in bed pretty early as we had a relatively early start. After a great sleep and delicious breakfast followed by goodbyes to our always excellent hosts, we hit the road again - this time heading north. We decided we couldn't face the Blue Mountains road so we went west via Newcastle - it added an extra hour or so, but did present us with a nice opportunity to visit the Dubbo Zoo on our way to Parkes. After 6 hours of driving we made it to the zoo entrance by 2pm, just as everyone else seemed to be leaving despite the zoo not closing until 4pm. Unfortunatly the bike hire place had shut, so we had to get around the 5km loop on our legs which would have been harder if we hadn't been able to stop for icecreams half way around. Zebras. And Humans. How cute are those meerkats! And the elephant that refused to take Zali for a ride. We left Dubbo after 5 and had another hour to our cheapo motel at Parkes, which despite its dodgy appearance, was pretty spacious on the inside. We met Andy for dinner of hamburgers, the first of a run of 4 straight days of takeaway meals - something I don't think we've ever done before! The next day the orienteering didn't start until the afternoon so we had time for a visit to the Parkes Dish: Then it was out to some forest near Eugowra where we all had fun running the NSW middle distance championships. The rocks were very big.. Driving back to Parkes we drove under this huge flock of bats circling a group of trees - the sky was practically black with them. It was so amazing we pulled over to watch them for a while. That evening we had free-choice takeaway (I got noodles, Jon & Jett had Thai, Andy had Indian, and Zali had Dominos), and watched The Dish on the dvd player in our room - the movie holds up pretty well and even managed to keep the kids watching for the duration - which is quite an achievement for a non-modern movie! The next day we were back out at Eugowra for the NSW Long Distance Champs. And long it certainly was - I made 10 minutes of mistakes at one control, and took it pretty slowly after that, ending up with a total time of 97 minutes - fast enough to win which was crazy. The terrain was very difficult to move through at any speed, and the technical challenge was very high. All the winning times were very long. Zali and Jett both had good runs on the same course I was doing, and Jon had a pretty good run on his longer course. Unlike the really long day of Easter, it wasn't hot (it was freezing), and there was water out on the course, although suspecting longer times, I carried my own as well. After collecting our badges (we haven't had badges as prizes for a while!), we drove towards our final night's accommodation at Mt Victoria, stopping to visit some Karst terrain on the way.. We decided to spend the night at Mt Victoria to avoid the traffic surge heading back to Sydney on the Sunday night. It turned out to be a good decision as the holdups started right after we turned off to our somewhat fancy hotel. Our 3rd night of takeaway was Indian from one of the Katoomba indian places - and it was great - although we did have to wait for the traffic to clear before going to get it. The next morning we had fancy breakfast (part of the tariff), before packing up and heading down the road to Evan's lookout. From Evans Lookout we set off on the 6km Grand Canyon hike, which was completely awesome although my phone struggled a lot with the low light. If you only do one walk in the Blue Mountains this would be a good one to do. Without rushing we got around the circuit in about 90 minutes, well less than the advertised 3-4 hours. This meant we still had some time to kill before our flight, so we went to the obvious place - Ikea! It was good timing actually as we were all pretty hungry by the time we arrived, so we had a great Ikea lunch (not quite as cheap as breakfast though), then checked out the store and the neighbouring sports store Decathalon. Then we still had time to grab an Ikea icecream before going to the airport. Our flight home was smooth and we were kindly picked up by Clare (saving us $ on parking which was good as we spent so much money on takeaway!). What a holiday - it was fantastic to see our friends again, we're lucky that we could do that!
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