South of Sydney

I've been trying to get Kat to write a post for some time... but you might notice that it's not working! So in the mean time I thought I'd put up a few pictures from this last weekend.

This last weekend, a friend of mine went out of town and was kind enough to let me borrow his car for the duration of his ski trip. It offered Kat and I the rare ability to easily travel around Sydney but it offered me the great opportunity to drive a 6-speed French-built right-hand-drive car. It was a blast!

At first we did the very boring but but necessary shopping trips to the grocery store and Ikea. But yesterday it was decided that we must utilize the opportunity to see things we normally wouldn't get to since we're limited to public and bicycle transportatio. We drove south.

South of Sydney the land opens up. First you drive through Royal National Park, the second oldest national park in the world. We drove straight through but noted the turn off for Garie Beach for out return drive. South of RNP are a series of coastal towns all the way to Wollongong. In one such town was holding its monthly market. We stopped in and found lots of brick-a-brack and fresh foods for sale. It was a very lively market and the backdrop of the Tasman Sea was very refreshing.

Back on the road we made a pit stop at the Scarborough Hotel. We had read that the Scarborough was 'the best pub in Australia' and I wanted to check that statement. So many restaurants and hotels make that kind of claim so it's easy to cast them off, but then again, sometimes it's true.

It's difficult to claim that the Scarborough is definitively the best pub in Oz until I can perform a larger sampling (which I'm certainly striving for), but it would be hard to believe many exist of significantly higher quality. Walking in it is like any other Aussie bar: you order your beer and food at the counter and go to find a seat. But when you turn around to find a table you find that the bar extends down a flight of stairs to a backyard filled with tables and benches. Kat and I spent an hour sitting on a bench high over the ocean watching migratory whales pass. Maybe there's a bar in the outback where kangaroos serve your beer, but if not, I find it hard to believe there's many finer places to sit back with a cold one.

On the way back we pulled into Garie Beach. It's a great stretch of sand with tree covered headlands surrounding it. There were few people on the beach with most of them either surfers or fishermen. Garie Beach was a great place to relax, and we did so until the sun went behind the hills and it was time to drive back north.