Day 51 (March 22) - Cobargo to Abercrombie River via Batemans Bay and Goulburn

We got up a bit early to get ready for the meeting. As mentioned in yesterday's entry, I’d phoned Sister Jenny McDonagh from the Bodalla ecclesia last night and they welcomed us to join them for the meeting, which started at 10:30am (Bro David Archer’s CALS diary to the rescue again!).
We left Cobargo around 9:30 and stopped briefly at a Woolies to get some things for lunch. Mim managed to score a couple of rolls of toilet paper from a friendly person who had a large packet – this store ACTUALLY had stock, but ran out before Mim could get any, so thanks to this lady whoever she was!

From left: Sis Peggy, Bro Dan, Bro Michael, Mim, Bek,
(Front): Judah, Matt, Sis Jenny, Sis Faith, me

At the meeting we sung a couple of songs from the Praise The Lord book and listened to a talk by a Brother Art Kursk from California. The meeting was only five local members – Bro Michael and Sis Jenny, her sisters Peggy and Faith, and her son Bro Daniel, but it was a nice group to spend the morning with.

 We then enjoyed a lovely lunch together, including Sis Jenny's home-made Kombucha (which was delicious!), and they recounted some of their experiences during the fires. Bodalla had a few areas touched by the fires but not as badly as some other areas.  They spoke of the oppressive smoke hanging everywhere, and the desire to just get a lungful of fresh air and being unable to.  It must have been a difficult experience.  They did share that the apple orchards around Batlow and Tumut would likely need some apple pickers so we considered whether to take our route through that area.  Impending border closures announced later in the day have likely kyboshed that idea unfortunately as it sounds like they could have done with the help.

We departed about 2:30, refuelled and headed out of Bodalla.  As we travelled we passed through a few towns which had obviously been badly affected by the fires, including the town of Mogo.  This poor little town had a whole strip of its main street which we didn’t even initially realise had HAD anything there - it just looked like open space looking out to the greenery behind, until we saw a little sign in front of the empty space advertising some tea rooms, which we then realised were now a pile of twisted metal 20 metres behind.  It was a desolate sight and made us really want to help out the Mogo locals, but at this stage we were running short of time and needing to prioritise a hard push northwards for the border closures which kept rolling in. Also, the bushfire / coronavirus community support GoFundMe page hadn’t attracted any support (between then and the time of posting this we have received one donation which has been lovely), and we had already spent a reasonable amount of our own funds in Mallacoota and Cobargo, so unfortunately we had to let this one go.  But we hope others will support Mogo and other similar towns and we will look for others like this as we travel.

Some beautiful scenery in this part of the world.
This was in the town of Lake Bathurst, just north of Tarago

One nice thing about today’s drive is that we had a chance to listen to some audiobooks.  Listening to stories and music has been a bit of a feature of our previous trips, and we’d already commented that we weren’t getting so much of these on this trip, as our journeys tend to be shorter in duration and we’re staying in places for longer.  But now we have to move quickly we’ve had a chance to listen to a number of Just William stories, and started a Sherlock Holmes this afternoon.

Narooma Bay - beautiful water!

At Bateman’s Bay we turned inland and headed towards Canberra.  This was part of the original schedule, but given it was now about 5:30pm and we still had a solid hour of driving ahead of us, we reluctantly decided to give Canberra a miss so as to reach a further north destination for the night.  So along the way we turned north towards Goulburn. Along the way we passed through the small town of Tarago, where we very nearly had an accident!  We were travelling along the main road and approaching a cross-roads when a car approaching from the right side simply continued into the intersection!  I instinctively leaned on the horn, braked heavily and turned to the left to swerve around him.  Thanks to God, he was alert enough and travelling not so fast that he was able to respond quickly to my calling to attention of his lack of attention and pulled up his vehicle quickly.  Had he continued through the intersection he would certainly have hit us, because there is no way we could have stopped at such short notice.

We took the opportunity to stop for a toilet break and a general run-off of the adrenalin we were all feeling – we all had shaky hands after that!  We also played a good family game of what used to be playground chasey, which we renamed Corona-chasey.  The ‘it’ person was the Coronavirus, those whom they caught were ‘infected’ and the now-free person was inoculated!





We stopped for tea at Hungry Jacks in Goulburn and I enjoyed the challenge of squeezing the 4WD and caravan through the drive-through!  From there it was a relatively uneventful trip to our night stop just off the main road by the Abercrombie River.  The only thing which was odd about this was that the road suddenly changed from a fairly well defined bitumen road with white markings and clear speed signs, to a patchy bitumen track with no side white markings! It felt like we’d stepped back in time 30 years!  As we pulled up we were greeted by clouds of smoke from the brakes – I hadn’t realised they were getting so hot coming down the hill! I had turned up the force on the caravan brakes a few minutes earlier as it felt like the Pajero’s brakes weren’t quite working so well, and was also using engine braking to slow us down; so we were OK and still had another gear to drop back to if we’d had to; but it made for a rather smelly camp as we set up for the night!

-- Greg