Winifred Wilson's Exciting Adventures in Space

A few weeks back, Mal (@maldamkar) asked me if I wanted to be on a team with him for a promotional road trip around the coastal area of New South Wales.  Mal is a pretty awesome guy, so I jumped at the chance to join him on what was undoubtedly going to be an amazing trip!  A little later, we had confirmed that #TeamMal would comprise Mal, myself and Alison (@alegrya).  This was excellent news because Alison is pretty frickin’ awesome!

Wow! Look at all that - the title is right: God help us if anyone leaves the car unlocked.

Naturally, we are all geeks, which meant we needed to create a list of all the laptops, phones, cables and bits we would be bringing.  That way we could ensure that we had enough power boards to plug everything in even in the least power friendly places.  For the interested – we had enough power boards to plug in 24 items plus an extension cord or two for convenience – who doesn’t want to sit on the couch while chilling?!

The day of the road trip rolled around to see Mal at my door at 9am.  We wandered down to the Hertz Car Rental place (conveniently down the road from my place!) to collect the mystery car – we had no idea what to expect here, but just hoped it would contain our enormous load of tech!  We lucked out and were given the keys to a Camry Sportivo – a big ol’ sedan with plenty of room for our clothes, laptops, cables and a little room left over for ourselves.

This car got us by so well, shame the gear stick is stupidly designed so you drive in 4th instead of drive without noticing.

Imagine our horror when we couldn’t find an aux port or any way to plug an iPod into the car.  The thought of having to listen to radio personalities natter inanely for 4 days was enough to make us cry on the spot.  Luckily, about an hour later when we collected Alison, she spotted the aux port in her typical crafty manner and we were saved!  Oh thank the Gods, we could control our music!  Unfortunately that was the one cable we didn’t pack, so we suffered through some radio as we made our way to Wollongong.

The Harley Ride

We made our way towards Bald Hill, where we were told to expect a Harley Ride!  This was pretty exciting, however the GPS seemed adamant that we wanted to go to Victoria, which mean that we had to wrestle with our own maps a bit to work out where we were going.  We did eventually find it (after we got it straight in our heads – we were forever searching for Bald Head and Bald Eagle, we are a little green at this point – I even managed to get that wrong in the first version of this post, calling it Bald Head a few times!), programmed it in and off we shot, already running late at the beginning of the trip (wouldn’t be the last time either, we are just awesome like that!).  We managed to miss the first turn off to the coastal road, which meant we took Princes Highway for a bit.  This turned out to be a really great thing, as we stumbled upon a War Memorial in the shape of a castle turret!

Hey look, it's a photo of me running, like the world needed to see that...
Photo credit: Alison Young

This was pretty exciting and Alison took some awesome shots of the area including a SINKING JESUS left over from ANZAC Day.  We weren’t really sure what exactly the reason was for the sinking Jesus, but we decided it was because he had been a bad bad boy, or that the quick sand got to him.  Or something.  Yea, we are a little blasphemous.  And onto the road again we go!

We arrived at Bald Hill after only a few wrong turns (not bad, considering the Tom Tom was completely lost still) to meet the Harley riders from Just Cruisin’, Ernie and Chris (two top blokes, we were definitely impressed!).  They had some beautiful bikes to take us into Wollongong for our next activity, a beer tasting at the Five Islands Brewing Company!  Someone had to drive the car, and I have had the pleasure of a Harley ride before, so within a few minutes, we were off, Mal and Alison on the bikes and me following behind in the car attempting to video what I could.  We will throw up some video eventually, after we polish it up a little.

Ernie on the left and Chris on the right, both top gents and members of Ulysses Club - the club for those that are cooler than you (man, I hope I am this cool when I get older!)
Photo credit: Alison Young

A Warm ‘Gong Welcome at the Five Islands Brewing Company

Our next destination was the Five Islands Brewing Company right on the beach in central Wollongong – you can not ask for a better location for a pub, let me tell you – for a beer tasting and lunch by the sea.  At FIBC, we were greeted by an enthusiastic Kate (@wollongong_nsw) wearing her wonderful #welovethegong t-shirt (which we scored exclusive first-edition runs of!!).  Kate introduced us to Mick, the GM at FIBC and all round great guy who got us promptly onto the beer tasting, as any good publican would!  We tasted all the local brews and heard some pretty rocking stories of the origins of a few (not retired) brews!  Seriously recommend a visit here.  Mick is also a personal champion of mine as he promises 10 pints and no hangover on any of the FIBC brews!  How can you go wrong?

Mick from FIBC giving me some sage advice (mostly regarding beer and other great subjects)
Photo credit: Alison Young

We tried a few different beers, here are some of our cups. No middies here, pints and half-pints only - a proper Aussie pub!
Photo Credit: Alison Young

After a great round of beer tasting we sat down with Katie and enjoyed a beautiful meal and a great chat about the We Love the Gong campaign (which we thoroughly enjoyed being a part of!!) and the awesome adoption seen through local businesses even as early as today, the launch day!  Mal asked Katie what she thought of Kiama, egging her on with comments of how much better The Gong was, but as the brilliant operator she is, she saw right through his charade and told us that it was also a beautiful place.  Soon after this, Katie had to run for the official We Love the Gong launch functions, so we were left to stuff ourselves on amazing food and chat amongst ourselves with occasional brilliant conversations from Mick when he wasn’t busy helping the bus of Asian tourists that had just arrived!  We eventually reluctantly dragged ourselves away from this fantastic place in order to make out way south to Kiama where we had accommodation booked for the evening.

Katie (#welovethegong, Mal and myself enjoying a brew and apparently some really great joke.
Photo credit: Alison Young

Arriving in Kiama

By the time we arrived in Kiama it had become dark, so I was in the position of finding a place I had never been with just the Tom Tom’s guidance and a car full of rowdy stories.  Naturally, I missed the turn and added the first of many straight-line-reverses to the trip.  This became a theme as the Kiwi voice on the Tom Tom had a habit of trailing off mid sentence, causing us to laugh and miss turns.  None the less, we made it there alive, quickly set up our charging stations, got a WiFi hot spot going with the Optus 3G connection and settled in to our 2-bedroom chalet.  It is a wonder all the lights in Kiama didn’t dim with the power we must have been drawing!!

After a few hours, it was unanimous that we had to go and get some food, so we set off on a hunt to find that little street we were sure we drove past coming into the Easts Beach Holiday Park.  Something cool about travelling to the country – there is always parking!  We never once had to wait for people to move or stop acting like jerks to get a car space, a very nice change from Sydney.  We took a walk up and down the main street until we finally settled on eating at Ritzy’s, which made us an awesome Chorizo Pizza.  After dinner, we headed home with the intention to sleep through til our ungodly wake up hour of 4.30am for something called the “Illawarra Fly.”  Of course, we are a little bit stupid and watch TV shows that Alison brought with her until 1am – oops.

We did eventually get to bed, drawing Day 1 to a close, 16 hours after we left Sydney and with time for only 3 hours sleep!  Man, did we not think that one though!