The past couple of days has been spent remembering how to pack the caravan and deciding what clothes to take on a trip that we committed to late last year. Even the process of connecting the caravan to the car required thought as we have made little use of the caravan over the past couple of years. This is about to change with the current trip to the Hunter Valley, Wagga Wagga NSW two weeks after we return from the Hunter Valley and after Wagga Wagga, a couple of days in Melbourne, then Echuca followed by Bridgewater (all in Victoria) before we return home in early May.
We were up early and had the final items packed into the car and caravan by 9:00am. Due to parked traffic in our street, our exit from our driveway resulted in the car pointing in the wrong direction, however, at 9:10am we started our trip north. Much to our surprise, the traffic was light, and we had no trouble finding our way to the motorway to the north. Again, the traffic was light, and we managed to cruise at a pleasant 100k’s per hour until we left the freeway to travel the final leg to Cessnock.
We arrived at our campsite at 11:20am at the Ingenia Holiday Park at Cessnock, paid the balanced of our booking fee (we had received a credit for a booking made prior to COVID that we were unable to use), and then navigated to our allocated site. Unfortunately, we travelled in the wrong direction to our site and that made it very difficult to reverse into a wet and muddy camp site. We eventually managed to park and then watched all our friends have the same problem as we did. Small sites, narrow roadway, close fences, and wet ground added to the fun.
After setting up and meeting our neighbours, they are new ACC members who decided to join this muster (they are not in a branch), we drove back into Cessnock to purchase a few groceries from Coles and something to drink from Liquorland.
Returning to our campsite, “He” had to deal with a problem from one of the ACC branches who have just started a muster and a member has COVID. A change in overnight venue was required and the new venue required a copy of the ACC Public Liability insurance policy. That problem solved; we had a quiet afternoon before attending happy hour at 4:00pm. Happy hour gave us the opportunity to renew our friendship with 26 other branch members who were attending the muster.
We had steak and fried rice for our evening meal and that was followed with ice cream.
Whilst we did decide to watch television in the evening, we decided to have an early night in bed. It was a warm night and neither of us had a good night’s sleep.