Sydney-Melbourne

Happily back in Tin Can 2, which is not as nice as Tin Can 1 we have realised, Frenchie and I set off down the south east coast towards Melbourne. We only had three hours of driving to do, but this turned into four somehow, including a friendly stop by a policeman who unceremoniously shoved a breathalyser into Frenchie's face and almost fined him when I explained that he doesn't really drink. In Australia, this is a crime, but they let us off with a friendly reminder that the speed limit in a national park is zero mph because of the abundance of wildlife, and we continued on to our destination of Green Patch, Booderee National Park, Jervis Bay, which - slightly disappointingly - is completely deserted, untouched and looks like this:

Ugh. Life is so hard.  That rock, for example, has absolutely no respect for personal space. 

Only joking. After running around yelling, 'THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!  THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!', we decided to stay the night, despite the fact that there was no wifi or electricity.  What it did have was the grave of a girl named Harriet Parker who, in the 1800s was 'accidentally' shot by her friend Kate in an isolated lodge house nine miles from anything or anyone else. Creepy. 

So we had ghost stories, night time possums, kangaroos, wallabies and morning kookaburras for entertainment, and for food, we had the option of swish flat top BBQ in pitch darkness, or doubtful wood BBQ in the moonlight next to Harriet's grave. Frenchie assured me that he had spent many years as a member of a fascist Vichy Boy Scout group, and had learnt lots of things, including why the French are the supreme race, why intermarriage with foreigners is as good as treason and results in banishment to the colonies, and how to cook on a wood burning BBQ whilst evading food poisoning. Our steak, eggs, sausages and tea efforts were rewarded by the park rangers with two Camp Cooking badges for our sashes. I also earned my Transform the Tin Can badge (Frenchie got his between Brisbane and Sydney) and will be working on my Sunbathing badge, which is a challenge because despite the deceptive brightness of the pictures, it's actually quite chilly and I'm not sure how much of a tan you can get with leggings and a hoodie over your bikini. Both of us wimped out of our Bathe in the Bay badge because the water was really cold, but we did get up to hip height before both screaming like little girls and running back onto the beach. 

We then drove on to Tuross Head, and we weren't really expecting much but we were greeted with a beautiful moonlit beach and in the morning Frenchie made me breakfast (because my life is PERFECT) and we sat on the sand and watched the waves and ate sausages and eggs and all was right with the world. We then did adventure beach/lake shore walking over rocks and collected shells and hung out with sea birds and dreamed of coffee at the end of our adventure but found that Tuross Head is a ghost town in winter and everything is closed and there are no people to be seen other than an obese, toothless fisherman and his big dog... 

So we drove down to Eden through some very pretty countryside and stopped briefly for some coffee and a wedding magazine (gross disapproval from Frenchie) and arrived at yet another beautiful beach-lake campsite with slightly sinister undertones what with there being a graveyard next door and black swans on the lake. Although I am glossing over, slightly, these drives, they have been very entertaining. We have played lots of 'imagine we lived in that house/farm/ranch' and I have taught Frenchie to sing in the round since the radio doesn't work, and after three days he has mastered the words to 'kookaburra sits in the old gum tree' but cannot manage 'seek ye first' and so just sings 'hallelujah' to all the lines. He enjoys making up his own patriotic lyrics to 'London's burning' which included 'British dying, British dying!  Fire fire!  Fire fire!  French are laughing, French are laughing!'  He also insists on making up his own tune to 'gonna lay down my sword and shield', so this isn't working, currently, either. 

In Eden, we'd missed the whales, so instead we went for a walk through the national park of failed Victorian entrepreneur, Ben Boyd, lunched at yet another beautiful private beach and then headed down to Melbourne via a nowhere town called Paynesville. What we noticed on these last two days' driving was the whole lot of nothingness that exists between Eden and Melbourne. We drove for a very, very long time without seeing very much at all, and when we did pull into a petrol station in towns with population 200, the isolation was evident from the $5 they were charging for coffee. I guess it takes a lot of petrol and a truck driver's wage to get coffee beans into the middle of nowhere. 

Pictures to be added later when we (possibly) get some convenient Internet access!