PART ONE – SYDNEY TO PORT MACQUARIE
On Saturday morning the 22nd of December my friends Esmee & Jasper and I drove off on our two week road trip. To escape the city of Sydney during the busy holidays we planned on driving from Sydney to Noosa and back, stopping at the most beautiful spots along the way. We rented a campervan, packed our stuff and off we went!
Nothing new in Newcastle
Our first stop was Newcastle, a city a little over two hours north of Sydney. I’ve been to Newcastle once before, and even though I really enjoyed visiting Australia seventh largest city, I was amazed about how quiet this place was. Going there for a second time around I expected to find a little bit more liveliness but I found the opposite: it was even more quiet. We wandered around the streets for an hour and only crossed paths with another human being once or twice. We also drove up to the famous Anzac Walk but as it was extremely windy that day we soon rushed back into our comfy little campervan. One thing was clear: Newcastle was not for us. Let’s vamos and continue our trip!
Our first campsite for the night was in Port Stephens, at Big4 Koala Shores. Turning our campervan into a bed turned out to be super easy, and also setting up Jasper’s tent (which we purchased for a 35 bucks at Kmart) was as simple as it could be. You just had to throw the tent in the air and, voila, it’s done! Folding the tent back up was a little bit more challenging, but lets not get into that… 😉
Rain rain, go away, come again another day…
At night it rained. A lot. Luckily we all stayed dry, but hey – this is not what we want on our holiday! We decided to change our plans. If we wanted to be around Byron Bay for Christmas we still had a lot of driving to do. We decided to drive to Port Macquarie with a little stop at Seal Rocks in Myall National Park on the way. Seal Rocks was beautiful! A gorgeous, wide sandy beach with squeaky sand and clear waters. It was the perfect place for us to relax before we continued the drive to Port Macquarie.
After having found a new campsite to set up our little home base for the night, we rushed off to the beach for the coastal walk during sunset. And oh my – it was a pretty one! Port Macquarie really pleasantly surprised us.
Cute Koala’s and lots of driving
We changed our plans. Again 😉 We figured that if we wanted to be in Noosa for Christmas and in Byron Bay for New Years on the way back down, we still had a lot of driving to do. A lot. 800km to be precise. But not before we paid a visit to one of Aussies adorable native animals: koala’s! 
We went to the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie to see which furry friends were rescued and taken care of in this amazing place. Lots of Koala’s suffer from Chlamydia, are hit by traffic or attacked by domestic animals.The PM Koala Hospital takes care of these animals until they are ready to released back into the wild again. If they remain with a handicap, like blindness for example, they will stay at the hospital where volunteers lovingly take care of them.
After the visit to the hospital we drove all the way up to Noosa – a very long and tiring journey for Esmee as she was the only one driving. But being the car-star she is we arrived safe and sound.
I’ll tell you all about Noosa in the next blog.
❤ Eef
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