Our Trip Up North: Part One, The way Up

Earlier this month we packed up the 4wd (to the rafters and beyond) and left our regular homely mish-mash daily routine for a more nomadic live-in-the-moment/live-on-baked beans/and don't bathe for days routine that is always so refreshing.

We were headed for Northern NSW for a weekend of family, fun and Great Granny turning 90.

As we are some what budget conscious travellers and always up for an adventure, we had no plans as to where we were going to stay, we had a general direction in mind (as you do when heading NORTH) but figured we'd find somewhere eventually. And EVENTUALLY we did, a beautiful National Park (Very small and in the middle of somewhere which was no where), it was so pretty, like a little oasis in the middle of hundreds of KMs of cleared farm land.

We'd set up camp and started a fire in no time, made a dinner (not baked beans, rice the other travelling staple) and snuggled off to bed.

After a sound sleep (Charlie first night camping) we awoke to icy tents and swags, not to mention extreme earliness too. The boys got the fire going and made toast, Charlie and I decided to have breaky in bed on this day, at least until the sun was shining on our tent and had melted the ice. The boys were having a ball by this time, they love camping and being outside, and fires too or course. We weren't in a hurry to leave as it was so nice to be on holidays and chillin out.

We knew we were officially tourist when we got to Dubbo and were the only people wearing shorts and t-shirts... we realised that we'd perhaps been a bit slow off the mark that morning as the day was getting away from us and we still had quite a way to go. I think we would have gotten a lot further and lot quicker if not for the GPS...REALLY not a fan of GPS at this point of the trip. So we decided to stick to the solid lines on the map and cover some ground. We made it past Gunnadah and then off the beaten track again in search of our second nights stop over. We found another "green patch" on the map, so we headed for that, we had no idea what we'd found until the next morning. We awoke to birds and this stunning river.

We were wanting to get to Grafton by lunch so we had a quick feed, a quick explore and hit the road again

We made it there by lunchtime and met Dad and Old Dad (Dad's dad) at a pub for lunch, which was really lovely as the boys hadn't met Old Dad before. We were pretty had it so we went to Dad's to chill out on the river bank and get ourselves cleaned up and relax for a while. We got to spend the next day with Dad and Valerie which was really nice and unexpected. The boys got to do some fishing too.