Pottsville Beach
Today was a beautiful day. We left Brisbane just after 9 am, stopping at a small shopping centre to buy groceries for the next week. It is interesting that fruits and vegetables here (in fact food in general) are so expensive. We pay more here for apples from New Zealand than we would in Canada, which is somewhat surprising given the short shipping distance to here. Cherries are just coming in to season, and are $17/kg. The meat is quite a bit more and nowhere near Canadian quality – except for chicken, which is cheap, so we’ve been eating a lot of chicken.
We drove just a short distance south to the small town of Pottsville and camped at the Pottsville North Caravan Park. It is a very nice site, and not at all crowded today, though the clerk hinted that it will be very busy from this weekend on. From here to the beach is about 200 m, and we walked there after we’d eaten lunch. There is nice surf here, maybe not great surfing surf, but Enid and I had a lot of fun swimming in the waves. The water is a very nice temperature, and the weather today was warm and sunny. There were very few people on the beach, just a couple of young boys on body boards, and another young couple. We had the boy take our picture, and then had a long chat with his Grandmother. She lives here, and her two grandsons were visiting from Brisbane (since school has just finished for the year in Queensland). She had visited B.C., Alaska and Calgary in late August and September.
There is an older man here in the park who has stopped by twice to have a chat. I think he is lonely. His wife is undergoing chemotherapy treatments, and I think he is here in his caravan by himself.