Aussie Bloggers

This family made a new friend when they went for a picnic at Pebbly Beach.

Pebbly Beach is located on the South Coast of NSW. The only pebbles you will find there are created by the kangaroos!

One of the places we will visit as we drive up the East Coast of Australia is the Coffs Harbour Butterfly House. We’ve been there once before and they had many gorgeous butterflies. Here is one of the pictures we took on our last visit.

Image via Wikipedia

Those of you who know me may be aware that later on this year, my husband and I are taking 3 months with our children to see more of this great country of ours. Our plans at this stage will be to spend around a month of that time in the Northern half of Queensland, a month in the southern half of Queensland and a month in various parts of New South Wales (broken into the first part and the last part of our trip).

Wanting to make the best use of our time, I’ve been busy doing some research into places we might like to visit. One thing I have discovered as part of this research is that the more you research, the more things you find to do. It’s like there is an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to interesting things to see and do in Australia.

Reading travel brochures and browsing websites, I am amazed by how diverse and beautiful this wonderful country of ours is.

I’m slowly coming to a couple of conclusions in regard to our trip:

1. We’re NOT going to have time to see EVERYTHING.

There is just so much we could spend our time seeing and I can see us running ourselves ragged trying to see it all.

2. It’s not going to really matter where we spend our time.

Where we are heading, I’m not sure there is any place we WOULDN’T want to see. Such is the beauty of this nation.

One of the things I’m really enjoying about planning this trip is how much my appreciation for this beautiful nation of ours has grown. That and my knowledge and awareness of various places has grown greatly. I’m really looking forward to the improvement in my Geography skills once we’ve taken this trip (it never was one of my better subjects – but there’s nothing like actually visiting a place to entrench it firmly in one’s mind).

Now I’d like to pick your brains. I’m interested in hearing of your favourite places in New South Wales and Queensland. Is there any particular places you LOVE and think we shouldn’t miss? It would be awful to get back and have someone say “did you see ……” and for us not to have even known about it.

Image by safaris

I grew up in Mildura and still have a lot of family who live there, so I visit Mildura on a regular basis. We took our young family to Mildura for Christmas in December and spent a lovely week holidaying. We left Melbourne and it was grey and cool and then returned a week later to Melbourne, again grey and cool! For those of you who are not aware, Melbourne is having an exceptionally cool start to this year’s summer.

Mildura is located 550km north west of Melbourne. The weather in Mildura over Christmas was beautiful, sunny and hot. I at last could feel that summer has arrived. Mildura prides itself on its beautiful weather. I love visiting in summer, where the average temperature for these months is in excess of 30 degrees Celcius.

October and November maybe a more preferably time to visit for others, with temperatures averaging mid 20s for those months, but still filled with plenty of beautiful sunshine. It is during these months that there is a number of special events in the town as well:

Mildura Country Music Festival
The town claims this festival to be up there with the other big country music festivals, Tamworth and Gympie. The distinction with the Mildura festival is that it is Australia’s biggest showcase of Independent entertainers. The event will be held from 25 September until 4 October 2009.

Mildura Jazz, Food and Wine Festival
To be held from Fri 30 Oct – Mon 2 Nov 2009 (the weekend before Melbourne Cup), this festival sees jazz in the streets, the restaurants & wineries, by the river and on the paddleboats.

But to me regardless of when I go or what festival is on, I love the slower pace, the beautiful sunshine and the friendly people of Mildura, which makes my old home town such a lovely place to visit and take the children.