Easter weekend fun

Back in England, the Easter Bank Holiday is traditionally celebrated by spending hours in deep meditation, while stuck behind another caravan in a 10 mile traffic jam. The M25 is usually involved as well, and rain is usually a dead cert, definitely more so than a white Christmas these days.

So what else can an expat Brit do at this time of year, then head out of town in search of some sunshine, and instead find copious quantities of rain, and not a few traffic jams. Of course, not to be outdone, England instead had heavy snow. Tell me more about this global warming, it sounds fascinating.

Our first destination, apart from the take-a-break stop for those who had drunk too much tea at breakfast, was Fitzroy Falls, in the Southern Highlands, about 90 minutes drive south-west of Sydney.

(those are the falls in the bottom left corner - the foreground is rather underexposed, but it's not my photo anyway). That's what it's supposed to look like on a good day. This is what we saw:

There's something very eerie about standing on the edge of a cliff and not being able to see more than 50 metres in any direction, due to the thick mist. Especially when you know it's 80m straight down...

Fortunately the cold and the rain eased off a little after Fitzroy Falls - Kangaroo Valley was quite pleasant, although my raspberry sorbet was a little suspicious. We did try keeping Lauren quiet with the age-old trick of applying gobstoppers, but we obviously didn't get one big enough, because it only kept her quiet for about 20 minutes. The rest of us availed ourselves of various refreshments...

Back in the car again, and on to Seven Mile Beach, which proved to be incredibly windy, so we didn't stay there long. Emily had already swiped my jumper, so we didn't stay too long to admire the view, otherwise Unee would soon be turning blue to match her dress. It didn't stop some people from going surfing though.

Our last stop of the day was Kiama and its famous blowhole. You need a good tide and a storm to really get it spouting, but it did its best to put on a show for the crowds.

I'm told it can be much more impressive than that. Personally, I found the waves breaking against the cliffs below to be more interesting, especially as below when a rather large rockpool was filled up.

Lauren found her own rockpools, fortunately not the one above, and spent the remaining time filling her pockets with shells.

For her, this was probably the highlight of the day, and fun for me to, because I got to do some father-daughter stuff for once, helping her scrambling over the rocks.