Against Kimberley's advice, we took the Grand Pacific Drive and Prince's coast highway, because our guidebook made it out to be spectacular. We imagined something like Big Sur, with kangaroos. Again, we were failing to take into account Australia's idea of scenery! There was one impressive bit driving right along a huge cliff, where they'd got so sick of rock slides they just built a bridge out over the water. After that, it was mainly driving slowly through bea
ch towns with an occasional glimpse of water over the horizon. Finally we made it to Jervis Bay, a nice beach front state park. It wasn't famous for its surf so we weren't to disappointed to find no swell. We admired the beaches and camped at a nice spot, hooked up by the lady at the visitor's center. (For once, you actually had to pay to camp in advance, so we finally made our contribution to Australia's park system.)In the morning I got up to go for a run, and actually spotted two little wallabies running away through the bushes. Sam got to see one too at the campsite. I was so busy admiring the forest and looking for koalas that I missed my turn back, and had a bit of a scary time wondering when I should turn back and whether I would end up as foxbait. Fortunately I found my turn the second time!
Wallabies are nice, but we wanted kangaroos, so we drove down to Murramarang National Park and the famed Pebbly Beach of the roos. There were no kangaroos on the beach! Noooo! So we decided to camp at Depot Beach instead. Shoot, we had
to pay again, so we headed to the campground office, and there, lo and behold, lazing on the lawn right outside the office: a few dozen kangaroos! Success! We took pictures and hoped they didn't come out looking like we were at a zoo. Stupid kangaroos couldn't even be bothered to walk down to the nice scenic beach background! Oh well. At least we got our fill of kangaroos. After a nice beach walk, it was time to camp and cook some kangaroo steaks, no just kidding, we had regular steaks. Though apparently kangaroo steaks are more environmentally friendly there because there are so many kangaroos that they are somewhat of a pest, and they can live off native flora efficiently, unlike cattle. Still we stuck with beef - the roos were too cute!
As we cooked our steaks, we admired a particularly photogenic kookaberra happily posing for us. Or so we thought, until we turned our backs for 2 seconds and the beastly bird flew off with one of our steaks. Sam laughed but I was mad! That was my steak! Luckily the steaks were small and we had four more of them.
Now what? Mission accomplished, we felt so empty and purposeless. During our beach walk we had learned that the ocean down south really was cold - not California cold, but not bearable in just boardshorts either. Also there was no surf unless we drove quite a bit further south. Originally we were planning on doing some 4WDing in our fancy new van in the parks down south, 
but we quickly realized that Australians are absolutely not kidding when they say 4WD. Heck they'll take an ancient Honda Prelude towing a boat on American "4WD" roads! And drive 80 kph to boot! When they say 4WD, they mean, Land Rover commercial complete with deep river crossings! Given that our tires were bald, our van was useless, so we studied the guide book, and decided screw it, what we really wanted was to go back to Seal Rocks and just stay in one place for awhile to end our trip. So we drove all the way back up to Seal Rocks in one very long day. This time we went through Kangaroo Valley as per Kimberley's advice. There was some nice, actually fairly really mountainous country (really I swear) and pretty waterfalls on the way. The guidebook warned that there were no kangaroos there, but now we didn't care so much. Now if only we could see a koala....
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