Moutains, Beaches, Cities and Mountains

Hi everyone! Its been a few days since the last update as we've been on the road, so there's a lot to catch up on.....

 

We had a lovely couple of days in the Blue Mountains. The weather was pretty good - the last time June was there she couldn't see anything because of low cloud, but we were really lucky and had great views of the mountains and waterfalls. The clouds did descend on the last morning, so we decided to cut our losses and head off.

 

The plan was to go straight to Canberra, but we decided to go via the NSW coast on the Great Pacific Highway, and it turned into a 2 day diversion! The coast and countryside was really beautiful and we had great fun swimming in the sea and watching kangeroos on Pebby Beach (which of course was sandy not pebbly). The only hiccup on our journey was our inability to find anywhere to sleep on Saturday night. We wanted to stay in a pretty seaside town called Kiama, but couldn't find any vacancies. We decided to head south in search of somewhere else, and eventually found a room in the Australia Hotel in Nowra. The room was fine for $50, although when we moved the beds together we discovered a collection of dead cockroaches on the floor! Worse was to come though, as at 1am an almighty argument broke out between a girl staying at the hotel and her inebriated boyfriend on the street below. He turned the sky blue for well over an hour and ended up throwing beer bottles at the hotel! Makes June and my occasional disagreements seem fairly minor by comparison!

 

We finally got to Canberra on Sunday night, and were pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. We'd heard stories about it being a bit on the dull side, and although it certainly didn't have the buzz of Sydney it was in a pretty setting and had some fantastic museums. We visited the old and new Parliament buildings which were really interesting - especially the old one which has been turned into a museum and lets you look inside the old PM's offices etc. Yesterday we visited the War Memorial which also had a great museum attached. We could easily have spent another day in Canberra, but instead drove down last night to Cooma, which is a town just outside the Snowy Mountains, Australia's main ski resort. We're going to spend the next couple of days hiking up and around Mount Kosciuszko, before heading down to Melbourne on Friday to visit Jo and Ole.

 

OK, that's us caught up I think! We've loaded some more photos. Bye for now!