Port Macquarie Trip 2018, Days 1 to 3: Getting there and settling in

Another year, another trip to Port Macquarie. Our challenge with this annual holiday is to enjoy favourites while mixing it up a bit too. Fortunately, it’s such a rich area – history, landscape, culture – that it’s usually possible to do this.

I’ll start, though, with the trip up.

Driving, driving, driving

Last year we made the mistake – though it did result in some different experiences – of driving a very long first day to Forster (some 650kms). We didn’t repeat that effort, but did stay somewhere different from our previous overnight stops – Raymond Terrace (460kms.) We also tried a different accommodation experience to the usual roadtrip overnight motel stop – a b&b. We pulled up to find one of the owners hosing the garden. Yes, one of their two rooms was free, and yes, we could have it. It was lovely:

• cosy room with en-suite
• lovely guest lounge with tea-making facilities and home-made weetbix slice (for Len)
• delicious home-cooked breakfast in their sunny, open kitchen
• friendly hosts
• walking distance to the township (and the Junction Inn Hotel where we dined on decent, though not necessarily exciting, pub food. The best part was sitting on the enclosed verandah, overlooking the Hunter River at sunset.)

Getting there was pretty uneventful. We stopped on spec at Kiki’s in the Grove for our morning cuppa, its having caught our eye as something new in the area. As we suspected it was the old Grandma’s Little Bakery cafe (in the gorgeous Fedra Olive Grove), revamped by new owners. The coffee was fine, albeit the crema had receded to the circumference by the time it got to me. But the gluten-free brownie we shared was deliciously gooey. (I’m a bit embarrassed to mention the crema after Michelle de Kretser’s satire of Australians and coffee in The life to come. Ouch!)

Our lunch stop was the cafe at the Campbelltown Arts Centre, which we love for several reasons, not least of which is its beautiful Japanese-style garden. I enjoyed my roasted sweet potato and zucchini salad bowl.

For our afternoon cuppa, having passed on coffee at lunch, we stopped at The Old Road Cafe, just off the motorway at Mt White. We often exit here to drive into Brooklyn for lunch by the marina, but this time we just wanted a quick stop. What a little rustic gem. It’s clearly a popular bikie stop – and we could see why. Good coffee, with a perfect crema on the long black!

The driving itself was uneventful – lots of trucks, but not much roadkill (a big change from our drive to Melbourne in August), and not many roadworks either (though that changed the next day.)

Easy drive in to Port

From Raymond Terrace – we are now talking Day 2 – it’s only about 2 1/2 hours drive to Port Macquarie. We stopped at the pretty little town of Bulahdelah for a cuppa, and then detoured to Taree – to visit my favourite shoe shop (but no luck this visit, unfortunately). From there it was around an hour’s drive to Port Macquarie’s Rivermark Cafe on the Hastings River. We’d booked a riverside table but it was blowing a gale – well, not quite, but the menu pages were flapping so wildly it was hard to read them, so we retreated (as also happened last year) to the covered outside area where I enjoyed the same dish I had last year, a grilled perch with lime mango salsa, and a fresh salad.

We then grocery-shopped, checked in to our unit, and had a quiet evening.

“You all know why we are here today …”

Saturday was forecast to be the warmest of our time here, so what to do? I knew what we wouldn’t do – we wouldn’t go to the resort’s welcome party. We’ve been-there-done-that many times. It’s always cheery, but in recent years it has included a sausage sizzle of which I can’t partake. Enough, I said! Instead we went to a place we haven’t visited before, followed by a place we have. The first was a little out of town in the Lake Cathie hinterland, the Long Point Vineyard and Art Gallery, and the second was the Little Fish cafe in the Innes Lake Vineyard (for lunch.)

Long Point had lovely grounds with just a couple of sculptures, and a cellar door that also doubles as a small art gallery. A lovely little place. We tasted their wines, but didn’t buy any, having enough wine at home. However, we did buy some of their alcoholic ginger beer, and a lime liqueur.

Then it was back to Port Macquarie to lunch at Little Fish. We sat on their covered verandah – as we like to do there – but there was a large crowd of people our age and up, occupying 4 large tables. I groaned, fearing noise, but they weren’t too bad! And, it was fun guessing “who” they were – as they did not seem to be there for a special birthday or anniversary. A Probus group or somesuch, perhaps? Then a speech was given – “You all know why we are here today – to remember Arthur and support Suzanne …” Ah, so that was it. Another speech a little later told us that Arthur had been born in Canada in 1934, and that he had Alzheimers when he died. At that point the speeches stopped, and we finished our lunch before they’d really got started, so no more eavesdropping to report I’m afraid. But, what a lovely group it seemed to be.

… and finally

We spent the afternoon – as we often do while here – resting and reading, before doing the 3km round-trip walk along the Hastings River to the Settlement Point ferry. It was much quieter than usual – no people fishing at the little fishing stations, no birds on the water, few watercraft, and no dolphins (though admittedly they’re rare.) But, we did see a big bunch of birds down one of the side streets – ducks, sacred ibis (or “bin chicken”), corellas and lorrikeets – explained by the water bowls on the lawn!

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