A weekend adventure

We went down to South West Rocks for the weekend. The drive is normally around 5 hours without stopping plus with the extra daylight savings hour added, we arrived around 12:20am. Despite Lani and I telling my parents to go to bed and leave the key under the mat, Mum and Dad stayed up and greeted us on arrival. The kids did their best to stay up but fell asleep for the last hour of the drive.

In the morning, I went fishing with Dad and my uncle Ken. I was hoping to catch my first big jewfish but unfortunately the wind and the tide was not on our side making conditions less than favourable. Uncle Ken managed to catch a nice size flathead around 80cm in length which we released back into the water but we couldn’t stir up anything else. It was still a good day out in the boat catching up with Dad and uncle Ken. I learnt a thing or two about catching a jewfish and hope to catch one up here on the Gold Coast in the near future.

Lani, Mum, the kids and my uncle John and aunt Roselyn spent the day down at Horseshoe Bay having a swim and enjoyed themselves.

Saturday night Mum put on a roast lamb dinner with apple pie for dessert, which was the highlight of Lani’s weekend. She particularly likes my mother’s roast dinners and apple pies.

On Sunday the wind was pretty bad so I didn’t entertain the idea of going fishing. We went for a bit of a swim down at Trial Bay, visited the lighthouse at Smokey Cape and then went to uncle Ken and Heather’s place for a barbeque lunch.

After lunch we packed our stuff up and headed back home at around 3:40pm. Unfortunately the journey home wasn’t too good. The Pacific Hwy was closed for road works somewhere between Grafton and Ballina, so we took a ‘scenic’ route via Casino. At Casino we made a couple of phone calls to John and Krysti (who looked up Google Maps) and gave us 2 options to head back to the Gold Coast. Lani and I decided to gamble on the more adventuress route via Kyogle and Murwillumbah, which in hindsight proved to be a bad decision. The road to Kyogle was great but the 69kms from Kyogle to Murwillumbah was windy and narrow going over what seemed to be an endless mountain range. At Murwillumbah we made another bad decision and headed up another long mountain road to finally get back onto the motorway at Currumbin. I think it would have been quite a scenic journey had it been in the daylight because we also passed by Mount Warning. But we were travelling in the night and saw nothing but a narrow tar road bordered by trees, frogs, cane toads and a stack of bugs now plastered to our car. The whole diversion probably added another 30-40 minutes to our journey and we learnt a few valuable lessons. 1. When going on a long trip, take a map even if you know the way. 2. Keep a torch in the car. Thankfully we didn’t need one but if something went wrong with the car, a torch would be very handy in a dark forest in the middle of nowhere.