Last night of campervan heaven - 3rd Jan

By luck or judgement, with two days to go before needing to return the campervan to the depot in Brisbane, we had left ourselves only 200km (~120miles) to cover.

So with that in mind we planned an easy 80km drive for today. The plan was to try and avoid the main highway for as much as possible, see some countryside, get a swim and arrive at the campsite with enough time to give the van a good clean out in preparation for taking it back.

We left Skennars Head and after a brief trip to Lennox Head for some food we started to make our way North. Almost immediately however we took the option of a scenic route (one of the many signposted detours from the highway that the Aussie Government do well to advertise) and therefore miss the traffic jams of Byron Bay.

We had seen a postcard with an old wild-west style street in a place called Bangalow the other day and this scenic route took us past there.

We stopped for a flat white and a latte, soaked up the laid back atmosphere and then resumed our journey. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. We took the coast roads where possible for most of it. This involved driving through Brunswick Heads, giving up on trying to find a suitable beach in Ocean Shores and the neighbouring New Brighton and then stumbling on a decent beach in holiday- central Cabarita.

The town itself was home to quite a few 3 or 4 story holiday apartment blocks, but it was relatively easy to park and the beach turned out to be lovely.

The beach/ sea had an unusual feature of a deep channel about 30metres wide before reaching a shallow submerged spit. Post the spit the sea got deeper again and the waves really kicked in; they were breaking so far out it was really hard to get to surf them.

It was not as flat as it looks

There were a lot of lifeguards on patrol – this was due to them training but we also saw a family get into trouble in the channel and require the assistance from the lifeguards – the family was lucky they were on hand (we had seen someone get caught in a rip tide yesterday at Lennox Heads. The lifeguards had finished duty and the person was very fortunate that a surfer went to his rescue).

We thought we were stopping in a place called Tweed Heads – a town that was home to the Woman's World Champion Surfer. In reality our campsite was closer to Kingscliff, a three campsite town with a lovely recreational park and good choice of restaurants. So after a deep clean of the van that involved a hoover front to back and the throwing out of multiple almost full condiments from the fridge we headed for a look at the beach and a Thai meal in the town before retiring to the luxury of our van, it's large bed and an episode of Only Fools and Horses.

The bed was bigger than it looks