Mylestom—Muttonbird Island—Our first travelling casualty.

Muttonbird Island

Muttonbird Island

Muttonbird Island

Our first casualty

Muttonbird Island

With Alicia being over 20 weeks pregnant, our plan for travelling down the New South Wales coast has been to make short trips, keeping travel time around one and a half to 2 hours or so. It has also been good to reduce the time Alina is strapped into a car seat as she has been prone to getting rather car sick. Strangely, to this point, whilst she isn’t loving being stuck in the car seat, she hasn’t been car sick.

Sticking with our short trips meant that the next logical stop for us was Coffs Harbour. Not long out of Byron, we pulled into a caravan repairer in Ballina to have our tow ball looked at. We had been porpoising a little since hitting the motorway in Queensland, but it seemed like it was becoming worse, most notably on the sections of freeway constructed with concrete slab sections. They checked the van for level, as it seemed like the drawbar was slightly higher and the back of the van lower—spirit level showed that the van was spot on level. The Ranger does sit slightly higher in the rear, as it’s been set up to carry heavy, so perhaps gives the impression that the set-up is not quite right. The ball weight was 310kg, and we already knew that our GCM (total weight of vehicle and van) was 6.4tn and so we were under our legal limit. The guys at Ballina didn’t see any issues with the van set-up and could only suggest we play around with tyre pressures. We knew we were carrying extra weight as we were carrying boxes of personal belongings we’d be leaving with family, and we also had 104kg of kettlebells lined up on either side of the bed in the van, that would be going into the back of the Ranger once that stuff was dropped off, so the ball weight would be drop quite a bit.

Still keen to avoid tourist hot-spot caravan parks, or more to the point, save a few dollars on site fees, we avoided booking in Coffs, instead, booking a couple of nights in the beachside town of Mylestom. It seems we’re getting the nightmare parking scenarios ticked off very early in our adventure. By the time we arrived at the North Beach caravan park it was complete darkness and, as the luck of anyone worried about parking would have it, this one was a 90 degree reverse park in between 2 sites, with an awning set up close to the road on the opposite side. The permanent residents on one side came out to ensure we weren’t going to hit their car, rather, came to offer assistance, during the tight reverse—they had nothing to worry about, apparently, as we nailed it.

Mylestom is a nice, quiet spot, nestled between the Bellinger River and North Beach at the south-eastern tip of Bongil Bongil National Park. If we weren’t on a bit of a mission we could easily have spent a few more days there with a few things we didn’t make the time to check out—the beach was only a short walk away, there’s a bowls club, and Bundageree rainforest walk is a 14 minute drive, along with numerous trails.

We opted to drive into Coffs Harbour, specifically for Muttonbird Island Nature Reserve (Giildany Miiriari), home to the short-tailed shearwater, or muttonbird, apparently the most abundant of Australia’s seabirds. The Island’s Eastern Side lookout is a short (1km), but steep steep, paved walk from the boat harbour causeway and, while we missed out on seeing humpback whales on their annual migration, the views were certainly impressive. There were no muttonbirds to be seen either, being as they migrate for the Australian winter, but their burrows can be seen all over the Island. The trip to Muttonbird saw our first casualty of the trip—Alina was done with being in the carrier and, always keen to go faster than her legs can take her, took a fall on the rough pavement. The rough-stoned path is excellent for grip, as evidenced by Alina’s bottom lip gripping to the path as she fell forward, seemingly tearing it open. There was a lot of blood, as you’d expect, but after a clean out we could see that it was a bad graze, with no teeth or gum damage, and no stitches required. She put on a brave face and didn’t complain at all. We finished the day off with a walk through the botanic gardens which, like most others, includes landscaped gardens of varying featured themes, including a nice walk along the Coffs creek.

And that was about it—back to Mylestom and getting ourselves ready for another short drive to Wauchope showgrounds.