TUESDAY 3 JUNE     TATHRA

Rain set in through the night, as forecast. It continued to rain, steadily, throughout the day.

John decided – and I heartily agreed – to stay put here and see out the rain, that was forecast to continue, over the next few days. In my view, a very sensible decision! Despite our extensive past travels, we really had not done a great deal of travel in the wet – and the idea did not appeal.

I went to the office and extended our stay until next Saturday morning – and we were given a free 7th day for it! Bonus.

It seemed possible now, that in order for John to see his grandsons at all on this trip, we may have to go up to Canberra, and then home via the Hume Highway. Neither of these were particularly appealing travel legs.

Right now, this was not being the pleasant, coastal trip I’d envisaged! Very little about it had gone as John wished. But his daughter had warned him, before we left home, that the Durras house was being renovated, and that would be affecting their use of it.

We bunkered down in the van, through the rain.

As we were now staying longer, during a bit of a break in the rain, we went out and put up the awning roof. That gave some shelter to the doorway, as we came and went to the bathroom.

We realized leaks had developed, over both the kitchen window and the one at the head end of the bed – again. Not good at all, leaks being the bane of any caravanner’s existence, and something this van had been a bit prone to ever since the stuffed up solar panel installation, years ago. In this case, there were probably a couple of areas around the window seals that needed silicone applying.

We were not very comfortable, with damp clothes after forays to the amenities, putting up the awning, and with wet feet!

After lunch, John decided we would go for a drive to Mimosa Rocks National Park, to the north of the Mogareeka Inlet. Really? I had mentioned that I would like to visit the odd National Park, on this trip, but hadn’t meant it to be in this sort of weather, though.

So we drove north, across the bridge over the inlet, and up a winding hill road, then through country that was a mix of forest with pockets of farmland. And with tendrils of mist curling around the slopes.

After about 10kms of this, turned onto a dirt track that took us towards the coast – in teeming rain, with low visibility – to Gillards Beach campground.

This appeared to be a fairly large bush campground, that would be quite an attractive place to stay, in decent weather. It would be very popular in summer holidays, I thought. Now, it was totally deserted. In different weather, it could be a pleasant place to stay a few days with the van – when there was enough sun to have the solar panels charge the batteries.

Today, it was too wet to do anything there, except drive slowly around the campground tracks, and briefly get out of Truck to look out over the beach and the rather wild sea. It was also far too wet to risk drowning my camera in the deluge – these photos were taken on a subsequent visit.

We did not spend very long there, then retraced our route – taking it very carefully on the dirt surface, which was a bit slick in parts – and so back to camp.

In our absence, some clown had parked his big van partly on our site, so we had no room to park Truck by our van. In an almost empty campground, with freedom to choose his site, he had to snuggle up close to us! He came out and apologized, as if that somehow exonerated him. But it did not change his intrusion – it is hard to believe the crassness of some people. Or their inability to park a caravan correctly.

Despite the adverse conditions – and the result of leaving our site unattended – it had done us good to get away from the van for a while and have something else to focus on.