Forster

Thursday, 19th September

The days are disappearing fast – only ten days left now!

Although the days continue to be very warm and sunny, we have noticed that the further south we travel, the colder the nights are becoming.  The woolly slippers and dressing gown were retrieved from the depths this morning!

With only two caravans remaining in the park this morning, finding a washing machine free wasn’t really a problem.  It has been very exciting this afternoon with three new arrivals, making a grand total of five (I wouldn’t like to count how many arrive tomorrow afternoon!).  We had a trudge along the beach this morning – so beautiful early in the day – but with the tide still quite high, walking in the soft sand was fairly hard work.  We then drove into Forster (20 minutes over some very rough roads), looked at the pelicans waiting for the fishermen to finishing cleaning their catches, admired the river/lake scenery, looked at a caravan park right in Forster between the river and the ocean (next time!) and then stopped at the main beach for a look at the beach and the sea pool.  Well, one of us looked at the beach and the sea pool, not sure who the other one looked at.  Then it was up to the lookout for some spectacular views of the coast and sandy beaches – and another whale.  We continued on to One Mile Beach, with its enormous sand dune before driving through the suburbs on the way to Woolworths.  Forster does seem to be a very nice place to stay, with lots of beaches (for those who like surfing, swimming, walking, watching, etc) and coffee shops.

When we returned to the caravan park (over the same rough roads), we discovered over a hundred teenagers had taken over the pool area and immediately wondered which cabins they would be staying in!  Turned out to be year 12 students from Taree High School having an end of term/year picnic and they all left promptly at 2.00 pm.  Not having made it to the bowling rink yesterday, we certainly made it there today.  After dragging/carrying our bowls up the hill and across the very nice tennis court, we discovered the one rink synthetic green obviously didn’t get much use – the carpet wasn’t exactly smooth and was quite dirty.  We decided after about five seconds thought, that it wasn’t worth the effort of cleaning up all the sticks and twigs before risking our bowls.  So we dragged/carried our bowls back down the hill – one of us kept an eye out for wriggling things in the grass!