My last entry on this blog at the last proper holiday I had from the UK (Switzerland) before the world went crazy in 2020. So I thought I would update it with travels that I went on in 2020-21!
I had planned on going to Morocco in mid-March 2020 but my solo-travel tour was cancelled the day before I was meant to fly to Casablanca. Good thing too, as it would have been difficult being stranded there, but I didn’t know this was a thing at the time! Instead, I was just so disappointed, having wanted to go to Morocco for ages and finally committing to going on a tour.
Everyone’s 2020 was pretty awful, and I was no exception. I was a freelancer and without a job, living in London became hard so I was trying to fly back home to Australia. But my home country was being difficult too and it was months, and hotel quarantine, before I managed to get home.
My best friend Josh and I had been planning on driving around Australia when I came home in his old ex-Army Land Rover called a Perentie. I’d always planned to move back to do this, but not during a pandemic! But when I eventually made it back, we made serious plans to go away. We had decked out the car with everything we thought we would need, and he cleverly built the back out of aluminium, a kitchen and so many other bits to make our journey easier and more comfortable.
We decided that we needed a test run first, to make sure that we had everything we needed and to sort out everything that came up during that time. So we packed up and went…
DAY 1
10th December 2020 – start of the test run
We drove from Taree on the mid coast of NSW back to the Pacific Highway and went north. We turned off at Hannam Vale Road and headed up into the mountains, passing through Hannam Vale, then Lorne. It was lovely. We set up camp early at Swan’s Crossing in the Kerewong State Forest. It was not too busy there, and there was plenty of firewood so we built a fire and settled in front of it. It was all new to us, so we were just getting used to where everything was and our set-up.
DAY 2
11th December 2020
Sometime in the night it started raining, and didn’t stop.
It rained so much that when I got out the next day, I stood in a puddle trying to get my rain gear out of the back, and the water was running down the back doors and dripping onto everything inside the back. I managed to get my umbrella out and stopped the worst of it, but it was raining, squelchy and miserable all round.
We drove through the state forest and along the Comboyne Road. It was still miserable but fairly pretty in the mountains with the misty rain. We ended up coming out near Port Macquarie, where we stopped for lunch. We also checked the weather for the next few days while in reception. There was a big storm front coming along the coast that was going to hang around for several days, so the way we’d chosen to go was going to be wet and windy. We decided to go back to Josh’s place and dry out the tent, ourselves, and work out another route that went west so that we could miss the majority of the bad weather. Good plan!
