During the first week of school holidays, we booked a holiday house in Kangaroo Valley – a gorgeous spot about 2 hours south of us. It was a nice change for us as we usualluy go camping! We were lucky in that we chose a house that not only had a beautiful back porch that overlooked Kangaroo River, the house was also next to a park with a nice walking track that took us to an acess point to the River. The River bank at this point was full of rocks and the kids learned to skip stones and they spent hours buidling rock damns across the River.
The highlights:
A 2 hour kayaking trip down the River. I was impressed that the boys lasted so long on the water without complaining! They were really into it and enjoyed seeing the water dragons sunning themselves on the rocks. Tomas esecially liked the short patches of white water that we went through. Poor Mike got stuck in these sections as his weight was so unevenly distributed in the double kayak as Ethan sat in front (desperate to be with dad). He ended up getting turned around at one point and kayaked backwards! I’m sure it was thrilling for Ethan! Towards the end of the kayaing trip, Ethan had started winging and it was good that we wrapped things up after 2 hours. We docked at a lovley camping spot downstream where a few people were throwing the ball around in the water. Tomas joined in the fun while Ethan climbed up and down the rock ledge making me nervous as heck! Overall a fab trip and I made a mental note of all the camp sites along the way as in the future I hope that we could do an overnight trip when the kids are a bit older.
Feeding the farm animals. The kids loved feeding the goats and a pony at a neighbouring trailor park which we revissited as the kids were really takenby these animals who pretty much ate anything we passed through the fence! (Probably not the best idea for these creatures however – we did our best to give them lovely green leaves and our left over lettuce!)
Fitzroy Falls. We did a 1.6km round trek through native bushland to a look out at the top of Fitzroy Falls. The falls are about 100m high, cascading down a steep valley, so the trek was fenced along the top of the valley as the drop was severe. I was glad for that as the kids really loved running along the path ahead of us – especially Tomas who was like a little ball of energy (really he does get plenty of time outdoors!!). Although the national park didn’t seem very large, as we could hear the highway not far away, it was a nice trek – something we don’t do very often. The falls were a big hit and the kids especially liked the enormous termite mound! On the way back, as we drove through Fitzroy Village we stopped in at an antique shop where we saw tons of unique things, espeically tools like Poppi collects. The kids relaly wanted to buy Poppi something but I explained that one of those saws just wasn’t going to make it home with us.
Alone time – what??? Mike and I enjoyed our evening after the kids had gone to bed and the dishwasher had done our dishes. We vegged out on our back porch listening to possums scrabling up trees. We loved having the extra space for a while – so nice!
Other things that we enjoyed were the amazing meat pies at a restaurant in the middle of no-where, where we ate our pies in the crazy mish-mash back garden of the restaurant and watched the cows across the road; an improptu swim at Gerringong Beach, and delicious freshly made donoughts in Berry (too bad the kids didn’t like them!).
Australia is beautiful. Thanks for putting your vacation on your blog. Loved it.