Australia is a big country. Like, a REALLY big country. For some reason, I never grasped this just looking at the map. It took sitting in the car for 600+ miles over 4 days with two very "are we there yet??" kind of kids to prove to me just what we were dealing with.
Let me show you a few maps to make my point.
Here's Australia's place in the world. Ok, the country does look pretty big here. I'll give it that.
But here's a closeup. That looks manageable.
Now take a look at the section we drove. That's a lot of miles! We saw a lot of Australia, right? It certainly felt that way!
But here's how much of Australia we actually covered. Yeah. Nothing to write home about ;)
But write home is what I do. :) Even though we BARELY left a mark on the Land Down Under, we did see and do an abundance of really cool things. So today I'll tell you about part of our road trip between Sydney and Brisbane.
First things first: Australia, like the U.S., has highways. New Zealand...doesn't really have those. So it's been almost a year since we've driven more than 80 kilometers an hour (50 miles per hour). When we first cleared the city of Sydney and started zooming down the highway in our rental car, we felt like we were flying! I think I spent the first hour squeezing the side of the armrest and checking the speedometer just to make sure Shane wasn't trying to take flight.
And driving fast wasn't the only thing that reminded us of America. The landscape along the highway did too. Shane and I remarked a few times how the drive "felt" like the one we would do between Washington, D.C., and my mom's house in Western Maryland. A lot of green fields, mountains in the distance. Highways cut through the cliffs. If we weren't driving on the left side of the road, we would have thought we were driving home.
But unlike that drive in America, this one offered little to watch out the window. When we cleared the city, it almost seemed like we had cleared civilization. We'd see a few cows every now and then, but not even a house in the distance. And while you can almost bet money on finding a McDonald's and a Cracker Barrel at any given exit on an American highway, Australian towns don't always have much to them.
Which is why the overnight stops we made -- Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour and Byron Bay -- tend to form the "classic" Sydney-to-Brisbane road trip. Everyone stops at these towns because that's where the motels and the Hungry Jack's (Australia's version of Burger King) can be found.
Port Macquarie
We spent our first night in Port Macquarie, a really beautiful beach town and popular vacation spot for Sydneysiders. The coastline along the main town had been planted with Norfolk pines, creating a really lovely, unique scenery I could never quite capture in photos. But I gave it a try:
While here, we went to the Koala Hospital, a organization that rescues hurt and sick koalas and rehabs them to return to the wild. It was as adorable as expected:
We also walked through a bit of Australian rainforest -- which would have been more impressive had we not already spent so much time exploring New Zealand's amazing bush. Still pretty cool:
After all our walking and "awwing" over cute koalas, we fattened the kids up with pasta and pancakes. Of note: While eating dinner outside this lovely American-ish Italian restaurant, we could barely hear each other speak because of the swarms of lorikeets -- beautiful tropical-ish birds -- flying overhead. There were so many of them, and they were SO LOUD! They even droned out the Adorables' whining ;)
Also of note: The Adorable Boy ate about 10 pancakes over the two days that led up to our Pancake Place breakfast. He was going through some sort of phase...that ended poorly in the bathroom that evening ;)
Coffs Harbour
Our next stopping point was Coffs Harbour, which I can only describe as a sort of Lancaster, Pa., minus the Amish and plus an Aussie accent. It was an odd town that felt WAY more American than it should have. Even the people seemed American to me somehow.
The big entertainment -- and our whole reason for stopping here -- was the Big Banana family fun park. The Big Banana is this super kitschy banana plantation/waterpark/amusement park that charges way too much money for way too little fun. But it has a mountain luge, one of those metal, downhill tracks you ride something like a go-kart down. Shane has been wanting to go on a mountain luge since he was 5 years old. Thirty-two years -- and half a world away -- later, his dream came true.
I teased him mercilessly about the whole thing but the luge turned out to be kinda fun:
And then we went down this giant slide:
And the waterslide at our windmill-themed motor inn about a hundred times:
So it turned out to be a good day.
After a surprisingly restful night in our motor lodge (when the manager says, "We've only been running the place two weeks so let me know if you need anything," you get a little worried), we got up the next morning, packed up the car and checked out one last Coffs Harbour attraction: Muttonbird Island.
The Muttonbird Island Nature Reserve is a small island just off the coast of Coffs Harbour that you can walk to. It's not a long hike -- maybe 2 kilometeres from the harbour to the farthest point on the island -- but it's quite nice and quite scenic. The walk was, by far, my favorite part of our stop in Coffs Harbour. But, not surprisingly, my family was more impressed by the banana. ;)
That wraps up two more of our stops on our Australian road trip. In the next post I'll share some thoughts and pictures from Byron Bay onto Brisbane -- and then the pièce de résistance: Steve Irwin's Zoo!
