Up early for a shakedown trip to stay a few nights at Sunshine Bay.

One thing about driving a camper van, is that it teaches you to slow down a little and enjoy the journey.
As you climb and descend and wind your way along the lesser roads you inevitably collect a tail of cars that want to overtake you.

I have nowhere
to go and
nowhere to go
when I get
back from there.
—A.R. Ammons.

You can see them bob out to check for oncoming traffic and then snap back in again when there isn’t an opportunity. You can sense them sit impatiently, awaiting an overtaking lane or slow vehicle pull in. I have been those people. I know how it feels.
Now I am getting a dose of being the cause. I keep an eye for opportunities to let the others pass.
But in Ripley¹ I feel big. And as I only have vision in my side mirrors, any frustrations on the faces of the drivers remain largely unseen. I may as well just travel along at my pace and enjoy.

After the mandatory stop for caffeination and simple carbing at the Albion Cafe in Braidwood, we made a somewhat unperilous descent of the Clyde mountain and rolled out onto the coast with the Police live in concert. Camper vans (no matter how much you try to pad them out) are inevitably noisy, rattly, jangley things that demand a loud soundtrack. Batemans bay was slightly more than a message in a bottle away.

I sang loudly and badly and accompanied Stewart Copland with my steering wheel bongos.

Sunshine Bay is a sleepy township located 160 odd kilometres west of Canberra and 5 kilometres south of Batemans Bay.
The bay itself is small. A semi-circular cobbled curve some 300 metres wide fronted with rough rocky outcrops, and a gravely beach strewn with driftwood and, during our explorations, a bubble wrap carpet of blue-bottles that must have washed up on the last storm.

Kelly and I wondered if you could still receive a sting from the desiccated tentacles (called dactylozooids) so avoided the urge to scrunch them underfoot. After Juno enthusiastically ate one we figured not.

Crossing the main road and directly opposite is the Pleasurelea Tourist Resort, a small tidy park where we snugged Ripley into a cornered site for a few days rest.
The powered site had the bonus attraction of its own dedicated shower & toilet building. It was clean, and the shower was hot and strong.

Whilst browsing the shops at Batemans Bay we bought Juno this dog lead and metal stake thingy to keep him in check.
Once corkscrewed into the ground just in front of Ripley, it gave Juno a 3 metre circle of freedom. Of course everything that he was obsessed with investigating (which mostly consisted of dollops of duck shit) lay a minimum of 3.1 metres from the stake.

Even so, we all agreed this set up was far more satisfactory than tying him by his lead to a camp chair.

Excuse me sir….is that your camp chair chasing that small dog up the highway?

1. Ripley is the name of our camper van. ↩︎

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