Nelson Bay / Lake Macquaries: nature, camping and crazy driving!!

Ines has been working on 1st day of 2019, New Year Day (what?!) on a boat (oaaaaah). Antoine is still on holidays and after that working day, we decided to drive 3 hours to the North, to Nelson Bay to spend a couple of days there.

1st day: We stopped at Salamander Bay to have a snack at a nice picnic area in front of the ocean. Then, we saw Fingal Bay, a near-perfect C-curve of sand connected to Shark Island with a sand path. We spent the night doing camping in the Tomaree National Park through the Big Rocky Trail.

2nd day: In the early morning, we went to Anna Bay, a beautiful sand dune that looked like the Sahara. Then, we decided to see Shoal Bay where we hiked at the top of Tomaree mountain to enjoy a windy point of view of the bays. For the night, we wanted to challenge our 4wd by going through the sand dune and sleeping at the Samurai beach campground. We had been bogged in the sand ah ah, quite an experience but Australian people were so nice and they helped us to get out of it.

3rd day: We had an early morning swim to wake us up, a small brekkie on the beach and we packed the tent to drive toward Lake Macquaries, 1 hour South from Nelson Bay. After getting our beach permit, we joined Antoine's friend at the top of a dune. We enjoyed having our first campfire there looking at all the vehicles trying to go up there.

4th day: Morning wake up at the top of our sand dune, we are speechless. We feel privileged and we can't still believe it. However, it was bloody hot there, we cooled down to Little Pelican Bay where we alternated between chilling and swimming. We saw the impressive Caves beach as well. We went back to our spot for the night, after a couple of hours, while Ines was cooking, a storm came, we had to pack everything in the rush, we had a lot of fun in that craziness ^^. We decided to come back to Sydney earlier then. We stopped at McDonald, the bolognese pasta will wait.. :)

This was our first moment of 2019, and we were not disappointed about it... How was your first days of 2019?