After a very restful night in our motel room we woke up ready to move on. We had a campsite planned, an old abandoned caravan park, with flushing toilets, water and dump point. It also had a nice little village just over the bridge with several cafes, but we didn’t realise this until we were driving out the next day.
On the way there we diverged to Marlo on the coast to see the mouth of the Snowy River, only memorable for the name really, but we found a viewing place for our lunchtime and rest. We stayed near the coast to the end of that road, then back to the Princes Highway and on to the Cann River Campground.
Yesterday we made it to Mallacoota and it was easy to see why people had ended up in the sea when the bushfire came, rather than escaping. There is only one way in/out along a very windy road. Although we could see evidence of the fire and lots of regrowth in the forest it was not evident to casual visitors like us that houses and shops had been impacted. Perhaps there has been such a rush of rebuilding and refurbishing that all is back to normal. It was wet and quite windy there, and with more rain forecast we decided to leave after lunch. There is no free camping there and we didn’t feel like paying to stay only to be locked inside due to the rain.
Instead we drove back to the Princes Highway to a tiny village called Genoa which offers a really nice camping spot, albeit with less facilities than last night’s spot. We are not sure if we have enough drinking water to stay here for another night and there is no drinking water available here. We could put out a bucket for rainwater as there is constant heavy rain at the moment.
Where to from here? Stephen researched going as far north as Wollongong so that we could have a train ride to Sydney, but rising numbers and wet conditions are something of a deterrent. So we will follow my suggestion of going across to the ACT for a visit to Canberra, then head north to Queensland from there. It is a little warmer overnight now and going to Canberra means being back to frosty weather. However, we enjoy the little city, people there are well vaccinated, and we have all we need to keep warm in the van, so it seems a good option. It’s a concern that even places around Sydney where flood waters have receded might not be suitable for visitors at this stage. Otherwise we could stay on the Princes Highway, which goes around Sydney, all the way to Brisbane.