Rick and Rae's Travels: Tues, 15th to Wed, 16th Nov

Leaving Somerset quite early, we drove for about 200kms through some of the most beautiful countryside to Ballina via Beaudesert and Lismore. We left Beaudesert after re-fuelling and decided to head roughly 30kms to Rathdowney to have some lunch. Well, somewhere along the line our Tom Tom had us turn off the main road and took us along a very narrow, winding road through the ranges. Thanks to Tom we didn't end up going anywhere near Rathdowney so lunch didn't happen as we'd planned. The road was quite treacherous, very hilly, single lane for a lot of the way and sprinkled with blind corners that unexpectedly dropped down onto single lane bridges. One of these bridges had workmen on it and they had to breathe in and move their equipment to give us room to cross.

At one point we were going up a 19 degree hill for a distance of 1.3kms. By the time we reached the top we were in first gear and the poor old Navara was getting a bit hot. We did make it OK, but it was becoming a bit worrying towards the top. At one point Rick was thinking we might have to get a farmer to pull the van up the hill behind his tractor. The last stretch of the road was called 'The Risk' and at the end of it, near the NSW border, there was a notice suggesting we might like to put a donation in the box to assist with upgrading the road. The box was located on an uphill slope and there was no way we were going to stop to do that and lose our momentum. We should have arrived at Ballina by mid afternoon, but due to the slow roads, didn't end up getting there until 5pm - we were glad to have arrived at all!! We checked into a nice caravan park very close to the beach and had a well deserved beer and wine.

On Wednesday we decided to drive about 30kms north along the coast road to Byron Bay to have a look around. The beaches in this area are beautiful and more like what we thought we would see in Queensland. Byron Bay was what we expected and we were glad we didn't bother trying to tow the van around there or find somewhere to stay. We then headed inland a way to Bangalow. The country was very pretty and lovely and green. We couldn't get over how cheap real estate is around this area and earlier Rick had spotted a nice duplex in Tweed Heads for sale in a brochure. We decided to drive up to Tweed Heads to have a look at it. It backed onto an inlet but had a busy road at the front which didn't appeal to us. We headed back to Ballina where it had become very windy. Thank goodness one of our neighbours had kindly put out awning away for us when the wind came up, so it didn't get damaged.