The Christmas and New Year holiday period is very important for most families as a time of reunion and celebration.  It’s also a good time to slow down a bit, reflect on the year past, raise a glass or two and spend some quality time with loved ones.  But it can also be a bit chaotic with gifts, parties, special meals, visitors and just coordinating all the different activities that take place during this end of year period.  For our family we also have an important birthday to celebrate each year.  So how do we manage to pull all of this off – easy, we go camping!

 

 

Well, not so fast.  First, we always have Christmas at home which includes the traditional Christmas cookie-making event, great fun for four generations of budding pastry chefs.  Then there is Christmas day with the opening of presents, a few laughs and hugs, and celebrations with our expanded family.  And this year we had a special reason to celebrate because Will and Gemma had recently announced their engagement!  This great news is probably the highlight of the entire year.

When the formalities are over, we go camping.  This year we headed down to Abercrombie River National Park, a bit south and inland from Sydney, not very well known and as we learned, infrequently visited.  We camped in a beautiful private spot for three days on the bank of the little Retreat River and explored the national park and surrounding areas.

One day we headed out across the dirt roads and through rural properties to the Abercrombie Karst Conservation Reserve (who dreamed that name up?) to visit these incredible limestone caves. The Abercrombie Caves feature a number of amazing sights (including the largest natural arch in the southern hemisphere!) and allows visitors to see most features on a thoroughly enjoyable self-guided walk.

We had this immense cave system virtually to ourselves as we followed the path, climbed up ladders, across bridges, around corners and through the various stalactite and stalagmite formations that decorated these caves.  Great stuff, much better than we expected.

We also did a six kilometre walk along the nearby Grove Creek to the Grove Creek Falls lookout (great lookout, no water), trying to spot platypi (or even just a platypus would have done) and enjoying the beautiful afternoon.

And we had the chance to get into some challenging four wheel driving up and down the steep ridgelines of the national park which gave Anna and Carl’s new Land Rover a good low range work out.  There were some old miner’s huts to explore and an intriguing place we had to investigate called Licking Hole.  Sadly there was no evidence of how it earned this standout name.

Of course the highlight of the trip was celebrating Julie’s birthday, and nothing could be better than to have our family all around us in these beautiful settings while eating chocolate mud cake in Julie’s honour.  How good is that?

On the last day we visited nearby Kanangra Boyd National Park, a huge park with many fabulous features, and walked out to see the famous Kanangra Walls.  If it hadn’t been for various work commitments we probably could have kept going for days (or weeks) more – but this was a perfect way to spend the family holiday season!