Road Trip Day 1 - Tragical Mystery Tour

Trip Start Jan 16, 2012

Trip End Jan 01, 2014

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Where I stayed

Arosa Motel Coffs Harbour

Flag of Australia Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia
Friday, August 3, 2012

Our roadtrip started on Friday morning under grey Sydney skies. The indifferent conditions could not dampen my childlike enthusiasm as we took the Nissan Micra over the Harbour Bridge at around 10am. Shelley was somewhat more reticent about the whole adventure and had to be appeased by my promises that there would plenty of stop offs in small towns along the northbound route where she could hopefully find bargain/abandoned furniture. I was good to my word initially as we left the Pacific Highway for the first Tourist Drive offered and were soon rummaging through junk in various shops in the pretty town of Long Jetty which sits on a narrow strip of land between the Tasman Sea and Budgewoi Lake. Shelley picked up a nice chair for 5 dollars from a junk (retro/vintage - "potato", "potatoe") shop before we completed more u-turns than an indecisive government as she spied various abandoned furniture at various points by the side of the road - all of it turned out to be on the road for a reason and we were running a fair way behind schedule by the time we hit Newcastle, which was around 150km from home and theoretically 850km from Brisbane if we were to stick to the Pacific Highway

Shelley in Junk Heaven, Long Jetty

. Unfortunately we were travelling as the Russell Crowe (after several beers), rather than the black bird of the same name, flies...

I had assumed that travelling north would be a simple enough exercise so we had embarked on the journey without map, directions or satnav. This proved flawed as we spent 30 minutes driving in circles around the streets of Newcastle before a middle aged surf dude put us back on course. It was by now after 2pm and we were seriously behind the notional plan of doing 500km on Friday and 500km on Saturday, in each case primarily in daylight. My fears were confirmed when we saw the first road sign with the mileage to Brisbane at around 3pm and it stated that we still had nearly 750km to go - a figure scarcely comprehensible to a Brit who has grown up thinking that any journey of over 100 miles is a big deal. At least we knew we were travelling in the right direction but it meant that deviations for furniture hunting were out of the question and instead the plan was to put pedal firmly to the metal to try and eat up some of the huge distance we had left. Shelley responded to this by passing out in the passenger seat for the reaminder of the drive which eventually took us into a stopover town - Coff's Harbour - just after dark.

Coff's Harbour was a motel rich environment and we naturally settled for the cheapest - the $65 a night Arora Motel

The Entrance, NSW

. The reasons for it being $10 to $15 cheaper per night than every other motel in the small town were evident from the horrific wig adorning the receptionists head; the collapsing TV shelf and fuzzy reception on each of its four channels; the incredible amount of dust in the room and the fact that the bedside lamps turned themselves off and on at any movement in the room. We passed the night drinking cheap wine and watching the incredibly biased Aussie Olympics' coverage, where they lose interest in commentating as soon as it becomes clear that Australia will not win gold (which is so far once in these Games - hee hee). However, ever since watching Psycho as a boy I have associated Motels with places where one gets brutally murdered (I have also been dressing like my mother ever since) so I was just glad that we both survived the night intact...

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