Autumn school holiday camping

These holidays, Louka's cousins visited from Perth. She really enjoyed playing with them and was very disappointed that they stayed only six days. Partly to cheer her up we decided to go camping this week. Trouble was, where would we go for a couple of days? Menindee Lakes looked nice, but too far to drive. I thought of the coastal walk in Royal National Park. Maybe we could do some of it again. I looked to see if camping was available and found one site available for Wednesday night and two for Thursday night - but not the same as the Wednesday night site. We decided we'd just go for one night.
We didn't get off to a good start. The new GPS told us it would take an hour and a half to get to the campsite - great, we'd get there in good time for lunch. Then it took us through Glebe and Newtown. The traffic was heavy. By 12:30, with half an hour still to go to the campsite, we were passing the Royal National Park visitor centre and café. We stopped there for lunch. It was an enjoyable lunch of chicken sandwich, beef and burgundy pie and banana coconut bread. We felt much better and decided to go for a walk before driving on.
The Robertson Roundabout track looked good, a short loop walk. We headed over the bridge and up the hill. And up. And up. It was quite hot in the sun.

After all that exertion we felt we deserved an ice-cream. Then we resumed our journey to the campsite.

Bonnie Vale campsite turned out to be a very pleasant, spacious place on Port Hacking, with sand flats and a beach. We had a bit of a play in the sand and shallow (10cm) water, then saw the sun nearing the hilltop in the west and decided to start dinner. Graham had prepared bolognaise sauce (his specialty) and we cooked the pasta and reheated the sauce at a picnic table near our tent. By the time we finished it was quite dark.

This morning we woke with the sunrise and made coffee and cooked pancakes for breakfast.

The birds - crows, ibis, cockatoos - were not shy.

Strolling along the beach we found several interesting things: a couple of long green wriggly worms, four hermit crabs, a fair-sized sand crab and a shark egg.

We headed back to the visitor centre for an ice-cream, a walk along Lady Carrington Drive, and lunch. Next time we'll bring bikes.