Im not making these town names up. I swear.

Yackandandah (population 950) is a former gold mining town about two hours drive from Jugiong (probably a lot shorter if you are not driving a brick).

Known by locals as ‘Yack’, the town has a main street littered with arty and quirky shops. In fact we arrived just a little early for for their big folk festival which starts in a couple of weeks.

We had a delicious lunch at Gum Tree Pies even if it was truncated abruptly when a swarm of (apparently pie loving) wasps descended on us and attempted to fly off with Kelly’s Steak & Guinness special. They literally chased us inside!

The Yackandandah Holiday park is one of the most serene parks we have stayed at yet. A small area with lots of shady trees dotted throughout. And our site was right next to a quietly gurgling stream that runs right through the park.
Like I said….serenity.

Until about 6.00PM.
Most of the visitors were sitting outside their respective rigs, reading and snoozing and chatting and listening to the gurgles and suchlike. Then it started.

I will call him the leaf-blower Dude. But actually I think he was the owner, or the manager. And right on beer-o’clock for some bizarre reason, it was time to walk around the holiday park with his supercharged leaf blower. I think he thought he was tidying the pathways from the first falling leaves of Autumn.

But what he was actually doing was making an immensely annoying din, sucking the yin out of my yang, and blowing up huge clouds of dust and suspended particulate matter that hung in the air turning the entire park into a giant snow-globe of topsoil.

Despite this. The leaf-blower dude strolled past each of us in turn, leaf blowing his heart out in slow sweeping arcs. We all just looked across at each other and sneezed and coughed up a little phlegm and then rolled our eyes at each other some more.

Leaf blower dude finished his work in due course and the dust settled soon enough and we all got back to our individual instances of serenity.

In all seriousness though, apart from the Dude incident , this was a really great park that I highly recommend.