Camping trip on the Hawkesbury

The weather is warming up and despite the occasional downpour, the temperatures have been in the mid 20's for the past few weeks. We thought it was about time we went on the camping trip we had talked about endlessly. So, after an expensive shopping trip to Anaconda, which had more camping stuff than I have ever seen, including chest freezers, full blown camping kitchens and shower cubicles, we were off.

We took the boat across Broken Bay and up the Hawkesbury River. We stopped for oysters at Brooklyn (still too big Clare) and onwards, upstream. The palm trees and rocky forests disappeared, and the river became wider as the surroundings became open fields and flood plains. We felt very small in our little boat on the big expanses of water, as we eventually hit Wiseman's Ferry, where we had been on the bike, a week or so back. I turned my nose up at swimming in the river water, which had by now, lost the peacock green of the sea and was filled with the big fat, (albeit harmless) jellyfish that we had been visited by last summer. So we went back down to a small hamlet called Spencer, where we moored for the night.

After a dinner of prawns, grilled on our new $9 stove, we clamped a mozzy net over the back of the boat, to avoid sharing it with big hairy spiders, and snuggled down in our sleeping bags - to watch the star constellations on M's iPad.

Waking up to the sound of kookaburras and an early morning swim, has been worth the pain of the head cold that I've enjoyed all week.

We've talked about this for ages and as the weather is warming up, we took the boat from Pittwater, across Broken Bay and up the Hawkesbury River where we went a couple of weeks ago on the bike. It was interesting to see how the landscape changed the further away from the sea we went - opening up onto big flood plains and expanses of water. We were joined by the big jelly fish that were in Pittwater last autumn, so I wasn't that keen to swim until we got back down. We moored in a little hamlet and cooked fresh prawns on our new $9 camping grill. Having clamped a mozzy net over the back with bulldog clips to keep the spiders out, we snuggled in our sleeping bags and checked out the stars above on M's ipad app and fell asleep by 8pm.

We woke up soaking wet which probably explains the stinker of a cold I've developed since. However the sounds of kookaburras laughing was worth it.