Wednesday - Day One - Home to Kempsey

We're on the road again ... this time to the Hunter Valley (a wedding) and then on to Dubbo (the zoo), Lightning Ridge (street art), Yelarbon (silo art) and then home again. That's the plan but as we all know, plans can change. 

We drove through rain today - lots of it, but luckily there was none of that heavy, driving rain where you have to pull off the road because you can't see very far in front of you. I was keeping a lookout for overpasses as well, just in case there was hail - which was forecast, but we realized that was for much further down the NSW Coast where the BOM radar was showing all the darker colours. We were glad we're not going that far down.

I was also glad that I could change the clock in the car. It is set on Queensland time, but once we were over the border, even though I had intended to leave it, I was hurting my brain too much to try to work out what time it was. It didn't help that the Android Auto in the car, relaying the Waze navigation app, was - as I now realize - showing local NSW time. Aaaargh. It turned out to be just one button in the first screen of the settings - which means it will be easy enough to change back to 'normal' once we're back in Queensland. (The appointments on my phone will need massaging though!) 

 The roadside rest areas are okay, and we stopped at one at the start of Yaegl Country - not far from where the overhead passes were decorated with indigenous art. Sooz was sure she saw a dingo in one, and there were certainly lots of birds and other creatures, all very colourful. 

As we driving through Coffs Harbour, we noticed a 'Coff Street' and wondered whether the town was named after somebody called Coff. Close but according to Wikipedia, it 'owes its name to John Korff, who named the area Korff's Harbour when he was forced to take shelter from a storm in the area in 1847. The name was accidentally changed by the surveyor for the crown when he reserved land in the area during 1861'. Way to be immortalised Mr Coff - not! 

But it was a good place to have some lunch and neither of us felt like stopping at the Big Banana, and certainly not Maccas, so we asked the navigation app what was the best cafe in Coffs Harbour. It obviously couldn't decide because it offered us a list of cafes and I picked one at randow - Hideaway Cafe. We followed the directions straight into the Base Hospital car park. What the? I was looking for a place to turn around when we saw the sign 'Cafe' which was near the 'Specialist Suites'. What a wonderful find it was - a choice of hot and cold foods, coffee (really excellent coffee) and cold drinks - and the sandwiches and beverages we had were excellent. We'd definitely go there again!

Back on the road, we made it to Kempsey just after 3pm. It was still raining but we didn't have anything we absolutely wanted to see in the area (just as well) so we settled in to do 'things' - I was trying to link one of my 'hand-me-down' Samsung watches to Sooz's iPhone. While that was a complete bust, I did reset Sooz's watch in the process (thank goodness my burner phone is Android so I used that to get the watch working again - phew!) and this time I was able to give her a custom watchface - featuring our cat Nigey! I also loaded some other Nigey photos onto the watch's image gallery so she can look at them whenever she's missing her - that's the only downside of travelling - Nigey can't come with us (although we do have friends who take their cat and their dog in the caravan with them), and she has to be packed off for her own holiday with Aunty Rosemary. But we do miss her!

View from the room (in the morning)

Our motel at Kempsey is the Moon River - and we usually get a river view room when we stay here. Alas, this time, and we're not quite sure why, there is a bit of a 'pong' when we have the door open so we have to be content with looking out through the glass. It's still nice. And we were able to watch the river some more from the on-site Chinese restaurant which looks over the river. The restaurant was busy - from a chat with the person who checked us in to the motel, I expected it to be a table of four at 6:30, and then a table of 10 at 7. When we wandered up at 6.25, we managed to get the second-last table inside; we weren't sure we wanted to eat outside - it was a bit chilly and possibly a bit 'pongy'. Dinner was lovely - we didn't order too much and we didn't have that long to wait for our meals. The table of 10 were celebrating Christmas and seemed to be enjoying their banquest - they had just been served their entrees as we were leaving.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

 I couldn't hook my tablet up to their television so we weren't able to use our streaming services - but we did enjoy the television offerings - 'Hard Quiz', 'Celebrity Letters and Numbers' and 'The Big Bang Theory'. We turned off the set, and turned out the lights, at 9.30 pm (8.30 am Queensland time - I think).

New Christmas addition :)