Weather and wildlife

After leaving Sydney I headed south along the coast to a little place called Bendalong where friends have a holiday house/cottage that they very kindly let me take over for the next few days.  A couple of friends from Albury/Wodonga joined me here and we had a wonderful time.

The only downside to our week would definitely have been the weather - it rained for four days straight.  And I don't mean a little rain for a while every day - I mean it rained almost continually for four days and nights and as it can only be on an ocean coast, at times the rain was torrential!  We were very lucky where we were in that nothing was flooded out and the road (singular) into and out of Bendalong was driveable the whole time but there were many places along the New South Wales coast this week where serious flooding did occur.  And at the same time the east coast was flooding the west side of Australia was, and is, continuing to fight devastating fires!

 "Washerwoman's Beach" - almost right across the street from my friend's cottage

"Berrara Beach" near Sussex Inlet, just north of Bendalong 

A plover enjoying a walk along the beach with me

Unfortunately the weather did a pretty good job of kiboshing any plans I might have had for extended periods of time on the beach, but I did manage at least a walk along the beach every day - even if I did end up soaked to the skin on a couple of occasions.  And the weather did give us an 'excuse' to go out and explore the area a little bit more than we might have otherwise.

Gotta love these very real lawn ornaments

Why not nail your flip-flops (known here as thongs) to a tree and then throw your surfboard up the tree too?

And when the sun did actually peek out at 7:23pm on our last day there we had to actually take a picture of it!

Although the weather might not have been too great, my experiences with wildlife, especially kangaroos, was extraordinary!!  You could see roo poo all over the front lawn so I knew they had to be around, and on all of the days I was there it wasn't just the poo, but the roos themselves that were present on the lawn.

On my last day in Bendalong I got the chance to spend some prolonged time with this little girl - a young one who had, for reasons unknown, been separated from her mother but was still really too young to be on her own.  I am now a certified "Wildlife Life Saver" and after looking after her for several hours she was finally taken away by Wildlife Rescue Services to be fed, looked after, and then released back into the wild again when she's a bit older.