Northern Rivers, NSW - part III

Monday 11 February 2019

We had promised to be up early as we wanted to put in a full day of geocaching.  Normally I put up a picture and the name of every geocache I find, but there were too many this time and upon my arrival at home I got too busy to stick to this routine.  What I'll do instead is showing some pictures of interesting caches we found, because that never changes: some geocaches are found in the most interesting places.

We left at around 8 am and drove the triangle Alstonvale - Lismore (west) - Clunes (north) - and back to Alstonvale.

We found and interesting geocache:

  

The cylinder had to be removed by moving a ring upwards along a pvc pipe and once removed numbers, obtained by having solved a puzzle, had to be lined up in order to get to the logbook.  Remember the cylinder in The Da Vinci Code?

Some geocaches commanded a beautiful view:

  

And others brought us to interesting places:

(Unfortunately my phone camera's settings have mysteriously changed to the wrong picture size, hence the elongated pictures.)

Removed headstones lined up in a park

An open-air church

In the morning we found a geocache for which we needed to find a special internet connection which provided us with the necessary information and since this spot was next to a shopping centre we decided to sit down and relax with a cuppa:

Patricia and Gail enjoying their cuppa at Goonellabah

 

Lunch we had at Distractions Cafe, Wyrallah and at the end of the day we ended up at Eltham where we stopped for a cool drink at the pub and found a geocache next door.  That was the last one for the day.  Tally: 32.

At home we sat down at a nice dinner prepared by Gail's daughter Katy.  As it had been a successful, but also tiring day we had an early night and decided not to get up as early the next day.

Tuesday 12 February 2019

We did go in search of geocaches, but this also was a sightseeing day for us.  Gail took us south to Wardell, from there up and to the coast via Ballina to Lennox Head.  From there north to Byron Bay and back again to Alstonvale.

On our wanderings we came across one of the most natural and peaceful cemeteries I have ever seen:

At Ballina we saw the famous Big Prawn:

 And as the Big Prawn (with a geocache of course) was right next to Bunnings all three of us needed a 'Bunnings-fix', so we walked into the store, but went to the cafe first to have lunch.

On the way out I bought a small gas-stove to be used with gas canisters as I did want to have something in reserve if I would run out of gas when not near a re-fill station.

From there we drove to the coast and found a geocache at a cemetery with a million dollar view:

More coastal pictures at Lennox Head:

We looked around a bit at Lennox Head itself and stopped for a much-needed ice cream.  Yes, the days are still very hot.  The shops had lovely wares, but the prices were not to our standard. ;-)

Patricia walking to the car

A rather weird sculpture outside of Lennox Head

Next stop: Byron Bay, THE tourist centre of NSW in summertime, hence my reason of not having visited it earlier.  I don't quite like crowded places. Besides, if you can find parking at all it comes at a hefty price.

Byron Bay's famous lighthouse

We finished our day with a visit of the Macadamia Castle, a huge business selling, yes, you guessed it, only macadamia nut based products.  Outside is a huge knight who guards a geocache.

The Macadamia Castle

 

We were back home by 5.30 pm and sat down with a cool drink and talked about the lovely day we had had.  Geocache tally: 14