We stayed in Wollongong for a week. Our accommodation was basic but central. We stayed at Keiraview Accommodation. It is university accommodation and it was clean and the people were really very helpful. It was really noisy at night, I am not accustomed to being inner city any more.
Wollongong is a large city with a beautiful beach basically. I loved the rock pools and the beach. The shopping centre was as all shopping centres are, only useful if you want to purchase something. My favourite shop was called “Something for Doris”, such a cool name and a nice lady. I didn’t purchase anything there, but enjoyed my browse.
The art gallery was good, but I was looking specifically for my cousin’s artwork, I had hoped his collection would be on show, but it wasn’t, so I was a little disappointed in that. There were some really cool rooms inside that building. There was a great supermarket across the road from the place we stayed and I bought lotus moon cakes and ate them for breakfast. I liked them.
Wollongong Trip – Cooma to Nowra
We left Cooma quite late and had to shop for socks at Rivers as Andy hadn’t packed enough! We drove to Braidwood for a late lunch in the park and had a stroll down the historic streets there. They had a great display on the local National Parks and Architectural features of the town, which had buildings from many eras.
We headed through Morton National Park on our way to Nowra. It was like driving in the clouds and we stopped and checked out a beautiful waterfall in the late afternoon.
We camped on the river at Nowra and read and had an early night. I was woken a couple of times by young people celebrating New Years Eve, and the next day I waited for the decent hour of morning to arrive before phoning my kids to ensure they had survived the revelry.
Wollongong Trip – Mt Kosciusko
We spent our next day at Kosciusko National Park. Andy wanted to do the walk to Mt Kosciusko, which was a 20km round trip.We were departing from Charlotte’s Pass.
I opted for the walk to the glacial lake, which was 8km return. I think I stopped about a km short. It was really steep and being as unfit as I am I kept looking back at the steep downward slope I had come down at the start and knowing that was going to be at the end, wore me down mentally. Andrew’s walk was a round trip so he had to come up that climb at the end and admitted it was the steepest part of the walk.
As we headed back to Jindabyne to go through on our way to Cooma, a hail storm struck. It was amazing that only a few days ago we had been worried about bushfires. I believe the bushfires eventually got to Kosciusko National Park earlier this month.
We stayed in a motel at Cooma as we were tired and the thought of camping didn’t appeal.