I have been yodeling 'I don't want to live more than 5 miles from a Myers' for as long as I can remember. Myers being a big department store that sells everything, well not like Harrods but a lot of stuff, and the stores are only found in the city and that's where I like to live.
I like the pace and the horns blasting and the emergency vehicles screeching by. I like the grit and the anonymity, even though I always nod and say 'Good morning' to total strangers, including bus drivers and rubbish collectors. I like the cafes and restaurants and going to the pictures or the theatre or art galleries. I like being able to get around leaving the car behind, cos the public transport is cheap and cheerful. Yep I like the city.
The Goldie is not the city tho. Oh sure it has it's pluses. It has a Myer right by the beach and there are certainly plenty of police sirens screaming towards Surfers Paradise on weekend evenings but the place is really only a biggish country town.
There is no argument that there is an awful lot more going on at the Goldie than in many places, say WOOLI for example.
Wooli is about 50 km east of Grafton in NSW, and is just a tiny spec of houses along one rather narrow road drawn down an isthmus of land which runs precariously between a creek and the Pacific Ocean. The public transport here consists of the courtesy bus to the bowls club which makes damn fine slurppy cosmopolitans and serves up some Chinese fare that must be bought only by locals cos the menu was so weird and there were no prices listed. We didn't try it, just not brave enough I'm afraid and they don't like dogs. I guess they just don't fancy the idea of bowling around a big old turd. I understand that.
There is a pub, where we were allowed to sneak Dog for a fab dinner and there's a caravan park and a wonderful little coffee shop and a service station which doubles as a ' where's the chocolate' store, and quite a large Deep Sea Rescue place, with lots of boats and stuff, and there was an oyster bar place that Stevie would have liked to have tried but it closed at 5pm so no dinner there then.
And that was it.
There was this finger line of houses and bugger all else. Lots of the houses are holiday rentals and so were empty, and I wonder if this gives the locals the shits.
We stayed in the second last house in Wooli.
The back yard was the ocean and the front yard was the creek.
It was bloody beautiful.
We drove around a bit and saw some country side, Kangaroos and a couple of Emus and rural stuff like cows and horses and open space and bushland which we didn't yomp through, because, well SNAKES and ticks and grasshoppers and birds and shit like that. I mean I might have been wearing my farmer Joe hat, but I sure as shit wasn't going country feral.
We got a bit lost and the sat nav turned into a wandering arrow as the maps became hazy and we found some lovely little places and a vehicular ferry that took us free of charge across the mighty Clarence River. We discovered that even the week out from their big festival of the Jacarandas, Grafton town was closed up tighter than a nun's what'sit on a Saturday afternoon, and we found the beach. Everywhere we went we found the beach.
We drove to Coff's Harbour which is a much bigger little town than I thought it would be and we found the beach. Bloody lovely. And we popped back out to the coast from the highway and we found more beaches and headlands and coastal walks. Bloody lovely.
But the best beach was our back yard.
I imagine the generous council had stumped up for these benches along the dune ridge just so the locals could sit and watch the day go by. Best bit of council spending EVER!
Dog loved it, I loved it, Stevie loved it although he doesn't enjoy the sandy foot shit as much as me or Dog.
We ate in and played card games and watched the biggest fuck off tellie I have ever seen, seriously we were so close you could see actor nose hair and I am not sure that's much of a recommendation.
And we listened to the waves. Ahh.
It doesn't sound like a wonderful time for a city gal, but I would go back in a heart beat, no not for ever, but for another visit. Sitting having my morning cuppa on the bench seat, looking for whales and watching the dumpers roll in, ah I can feel the heart rate dropping just thinking of it.
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