Christmas was approaching fast, .... what to do, where to go for the family holiday. A work colleague over heard me say that I had picked up a family tent very cheap and suggested I go to one of her favourite camping places.... North Stradbroke Island. Hey the boys are both seasoned campers and bush men, and I used to do camping in my youth so why not? After convincing my wife, we packed up for the big trip. How was it possible that we could not fit everything in the car...... after all we were only going for four days. Hmmmm I need to eliminate what wasn't important. Now my colleague told me that the island was limited for supplies so we packed army ration packs, bags of instant noodles and a ton of canned food. That was important. The tent was important so it stayed in the car. Then I saw the problem.... my wife needed to lose one of the three bags of clothes she was taking. So, the boot went down finally with some brute force, the three kids and my wife climbed aboard and off we went.
3 hours later after driving through rain that limited my vision to 3 metres we arrived at the ferry terminal to find that the booking I had made was lost. An hour later we were on the top of the ferry with the car parked below pretending to enjoy the trip with 60 nott winds lashing us about. Staying posative we arrived at the campsite an hour later and between down pours of rain we managed to amuse other campers by attempting to put up the tent in a howling wind. The instructions looked easy enough ......... Just a small hint to all prospective campers out there, when you camp on a sand Island take some better pegs than those little metal pegs that come with new tents. Using our initative we got the tent up with a combination of ropes, house bricks, sticks etc. Settled in we had the comfort of knowing that at least we were well stocked up with food, and thats better than something silly like chairs taking up the room in the car.
After asking the ranger where I could buy some ice, he directed me to a shop up the road where I discovered that all the food we had brought was locally available. Oh well, next time we will know better..... Lets stay positive!
Hoping to wash all the bad luck away we headed to the showers and I must admit I was feeling positive until I was coming back and was told that my youngest daughter had succummed to that old camping accident that we have all endured, called "tripping over the tent rope in the dark" and had hurt her arm.
While it was not broken she stayed in a sling overnight and then we spent the next day at several clinics getting x-rays etc. Ahh the family camping life.................
Perhaps not an ideal start, but things got better and North stradbroke Island is certainly worth a trip away.
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