Tonight, we’re home! Home for us is on land belonging to the Terrameragal people of the Dharug nation. So grateful for our home, and for the Dharug people for caring for it for tens of thousands of years. We continue to pay our respects to the Dharug elders past, present and those still to come.
After 93 days, we’ve driven 20,007km. Over that time, we used an astonishing 1961L of petrol. We stayed in 36 different towns across 5 states. Three new tyres, and one new windscreen.
We packed up and farewelled Coffs Harbour this morning by about 8am, giving us time to grab a couple of last minute souvenirs, and a delish coffee for me, and then get onto the freeway. The drive home today included our last couple of Big Things on the trip! The first stop was in Kew, about two hours south of Coffs Harbour, for The Big Axe! We normally stop here on our trips back home from Hervey Bay each summer, because it does have a great little playground as well. And two hours in, it was the perfect stop for some morning tea too. The final big thing of the trip was the The Big Oyster in Taree. Once upon a time those big oyster teeth windows were a restaurant apparently – now the Big Oyster sits proudly above the local Kia dealership. It actually looks quite funny, and a little bit out of place… but in the context of all the Big Things we’ve seen over the last three months, pretty much par for the course!
From there, we continued on down the freeway. We had plans to drop into The Artisan Farmer for lunch in Nabiac – we’ve watched it getting built over the years as we’ve driven north and south for our Hervey Bay trips, so today seemed like the perfect opportunity to enjoy their delicious food! Unfortunately, they’re closed on Tuesdays. So we pressed on to Coolongolook, and pulled into a fairly new cafe there called the Coolongolook Smoke House. It had some fairly decent reviews on Google talking about its pies, sausage rolls, and smoked meats. And we did have a very delicious lunch – jacket potatoes with brisket, and some pies and sausage rolls for the kids.
After lunch, it was just a solid 2.5 hours to home. And unlike our summer trips where there’s usually quite a bit of traffic at Heatherbrae and through Hexham, it was a pretty free-flowing trip onto the Sydney-Newcastle M1. We arrived home a bit after 4pm. Our cat, Chilli, was waiting at the top of the driveway and wandered down to see us as if nothing had been different for the last 3 months; Eliza saw her friend at the end of the street, and immediately bolted down the road to see her; and we all reacquainted ourselves with our house! The beautiful people who looked after our house and Chilli for the past three months left it spotless – they even went to the trouble of washing and putting new sheets on the bed for us so we didn’t have to this evening. Just little things like that make the arrival home a little bit more joyous.
It has been an incredible three months, full of experiences that will be memories for the rest of our lives. And it’s also great to be home again, to our own beds and kitchen, and to our friends and family. We’re all hugely looking forward to catching up with people over the next few days and weeks and reconnecting! Debbie will head back into work on Thursday, but I’m thankful that I will have the rest of this week off to do a few things around the house and just enjoy the time before work starts for me again on Monday.
Thanks so much for following along and sharing the journey with us!
