On the Road - Sydney to Newcastle

So, the road trip which is the next part of our visit to Australia begins today, but before we get into the details, here is how the day began.

Morning

I wake at 4.30am and get up and upload the photos from yesterday evening, quite a lot of them to get done, given all the wonderful night shots of Sydney. I can't resist taking another photo from the window at the hotel as dawn starts to creep over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.

Drew wakes at 6am and after a cup of coffee, a Lemon and Ginger tea and our ablutions we head down to breakfast at the Holiday Inn, Potts Point for the last time this holiday. 

Drew's First Course

My first course

Drew's Main

My main - note I'm still eating beef and chicken sausages,
even after suggesting the latter were an abomination

We go down to breakfast at 7am and are back in the room by 7.45am. We have a few more cups of tea while we wait to depart and I complete a blog post from last Wednesday and start another one. 

One final picture of the view

and we leave the hotel at 9.45am heading for the Domestic Airport at 11am, when our car is booked - we will be early! No surprise there then I hear many of my friends and family say!! The route was as follows the 9.56am T4 from Kings Cross to Central, arriving 10.02am. The 10.10am T8 from Central to the Domestic Airport Station arrive 10.20am.

We go up the escalator to the Avis desk we saw last Wednesday and arrive at 10.30am, only 30 minutes early. There are six customers or groups of customers ahead of us, but with the staff members increasing from 2 to 3 we get served at 10.40am. 

We are away from the desk having filled in all the forms and scanned the credit cards and driving licences a few times by 10.47am. We walk outside to the shuttle transfer and it pulls up immediately. Three of us get on and by 10.58am we have arrived at the Avis Parking Lot where our car is in parking space I03, which I initially read as 103 - but worked out when I saw the markings on the bays a capital i is so much like a 1!  

Drew photographs the car and puts our bags in the boot. 

Of course, Captain Jack, our travel companion, is in the seat of honour at the back.

It is a very large vehicle compared to the Honda E we drive at home. I get into the driver seat to set up - we struggle to work out how to open the side mirrors. With every button in the car pushed we end up reading the manual - it turns out, much to our amazement, given how high tech, the rest of the features on the vehicle are that the wing mirrors fold in and out manually!! Who would have thought of that, apart from every generation before us since Mr Ford created his passenger vehicles! Once they were opened the controls for the mirrors were all electric, very easy to adjust and get the angles right. 

We head out of the car park, after hunting for the mirror switch at 11:20am.

There is a toll road out of Sydney, but when we realised that choosing the non-toll version of the route in Google, we would only add 20 minutes to our journey, we opted to follow this route.

One of the great excitements was that the route took us over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, so much a part of this holiday already. I couldn't believe the pleasure it gave me to be driving over this bridge which we have seen out of our hotel window for the last five days and were now on!

Once we are out of Sydney driving becomes very much like US driving, except on the other side of the road, Australians still drive on the left. Though the fact the car is on the same side of the road, but the indicators on the opposite side from cars back home does mean that, I often wiped the windscreen when planning to turn for the first hour or so!!  It hasn't caused any harm, so far! 

The issue of driving on the left caused an amusing incident for me earlier in the holiday. The first day we arrived in Perth I was walking up to a crossing and my mind had defaulted to: 'I'm in a foreign country, the cars will be on the other side of the road'. It was only at the last moment that I spotted that cars were coming 'the wrong way'. Note to brain - it is the same here as back home!

Drew in his co-pilot role is taking in the views and notes that there are not as many fun/crazy adverts on the side of the road here in Australia as you see in the US, when one business or another is advertising itself 70 or more miles before its location. In this Australia is more like Canada, or vice versa with much more subtle signage. 

We do see a site we'd not seen before. A vehicle on fire on the road - the driver had got out, but clearly the heat or sun had caused something he was carrying to combust. At this time of the year in the UK any damage to vehicles is likely to be water penetration from the rain, not problems with overheating!

The Entrance

In preparing for the holiday I'd read a number of books and online sources, be they travel guides or blogs. One of the things they all agreed on was:

The striking 900km stretch from Sydney to Brisbane will take you across some of the most iconic stops on the east coast. Some of the most popular stops include feeding pelicans at The Entrance... Source

So the Entrance was our first destination and first stop - 117km out of Sydney we arrived at the Entrance at 1.30pm. The Entrance takes its name from the narrow channel which connects Tuggerah Lake here to the ocean. What strikes you first is the size of the river and next is the amount of Pelicans that live on it. One of its great attractions is that due to the narrowness of the Entrance the water here is shark free, unlike most of the coastal regions where they proliferate. 

This selection of photos capture the location well:

We stopped for a coffee in The Entrance and were surprised to find that Australians seem to have a predilection for a pie. No not a sweet tart that the Americans would call a pie, but a traditional and not so traditional selection of meaty fillings. Here is the choice at the, busy, pie shop in The Entrance

Swansea

From The Entrance we continued to head north, taking a slightly side route, to make sure we travelled through Swansea. This makes my third Swansea, the one where I was born, the one in Massachusetts where we stayed in 2011 and now Swansea, New South Wales. [Captain Jack's Note: Belay this visiting Swanseas, you scurvy dogs.]

We didn't stop in the town, but enjoyed taking photos with references to its name.

Newcastle

We arrived at the Holiday Inn Express in Newcastle at 3.50pm

The room was somewhat smaller than the two rooms we had become accustomed to in Sydney, but was modern and well laid out.

It also had the same branded shampoo, conditioner and body wash as the other Holiday Inns.

More about Newcastle and the various reasons we are here - and the surprise we get, will appear in the next post.