Palm Beach day trip

This weekend a friend asked me if I experienced culture shock here. At the time I said no. Life in Sydney feels familiar. But then we drove out of the city and I remembered that Australia itself still feels quite foreign. I cannot get over that these spectacular landscapes lie so close to where we live. 

Brian asked his colleagues for advice on good day trips out of Sydney. Options abound. Unfortunately, many of them involve long windy drives. This weekend we explored the northern most of the Northern Beaches. A one hour drives seemed reasonable and yet in reality the drive took longer and I'm sad to say that Emily got car sick on the way out and Tess got car sick on the way home. It looks like my Monday task is to find where to get an extra large supply of Children's chewable Dramamine. 

But the woes of car travel aside our destinations proved spectacular. We started by exploring the calmer harbor side of the peninsula. We started in the town of Long Beach and took a ferry over to a spot called The Basin in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. 

To get to The Basin you need to either hike in forty-five minutes or take the ferry. Once there, you can enjoy the calm shallow waters separated from the harbor by a shark net. The girls adored running in and out of the water and playing in the sand. 

The interior waterways felt familiar in many ways but it looks very different to see the bush come right down to the shore. I enjoyed scanning the trees for koalas while I bobbed in the water. I'm told you can see kangaroos and wallabies by the campsite but I suspect they come out in the mornings and evenings. We did see a pelican.

After exploring the child friendly swimming area we set out to the ocean side of the peninsula to admire the dramatic surf. Long Beach did not disappoint. 

Palm Beach extends for 2.3 km and earns a general beach hazard rating of seven out of ten due to a strong rip current. Each day the lifeguards set up flags to mark the safest swim area and this day the flags were about fifty feet apart. As a result, swimmers congregate in one small area leaving the rest of the beach open for us to play at the edge.

The girls adore the surf. We all do. We could spend all day watching it, listening to it, and feeling it run up over our feet. 

Emily and Tess love to run back and forth taunting the water and seeing how wet they can get without soaking their clothes. I love seeing them do a thrilled little dance, laughing all the time.