Exploring Not Touring

Our time in Australia was coming to a close and selling our van was now at the forefront of our mind

- Harriet Carpenter

We had less than a week until we were due at the airport for a full day’s journey back home, but we were determined to make the most of it and see a couple of last spots in the Sydney area.

Most of our final week was spent exploring with our friend Hayden, an Australian vanlifer and photographer. We chilled in the vans, visited plenty of local café’s and completed a few hikes just outside the city. One of our more eventful outings occurred on the way back from a beachside cliff walk just south of Sydney. We had just got back to the vans when it started to rain, which quickly turned to the biggest hail I’ve seen to this day. One of the bigger hailstones we picked up was easily the size of a small apple! The sound of the stones hitting our roof deck was horrendous, but luckily for us this wasn’t too much of an issue; apart from the windscreen, our van wasn’t at all smashable!

Hayden’s van, on the other hand, was a different story, for he had hundreds of dollars worth of very breakable solar panels on his roof. We drove as quickly as we could to find shelter, waiting out the storm under a tree. It didn’t last long, as tropical storms usually don’t, and soon we were free to head back to the city. The solar panels were thankfully unscathed.

Another of our little trips entailed heading to hopefully find some glow worms at Helensburgh, in an old disused railway tunnel. It wasn’t a marked spot; I had just found out about it by sheer luck, when a comment came up as a match for my ‘glow worms’ search in the Wiki Camps app. This meant that it probably wouldn’t be busy, but also that our chances of seeing anything was slight, especially since we could only find a couple of people who had been lucky enough to spot them. Nevertheless, we headed to the tunnel knowing that even if it were worm-less we could likely get a couple of cool photos along the way.