The Johnslingtons

Once you get south of Jervis Bay, the Sapphire Coast begins. It’s basically beach after amazing beach, all long and golden, some studded by morning and evening surfers, some essentially deserted. They’re so lovely that you’d wonder why they’d be deserted, until you remember that with 22,000 miles of coastline and a population a little over half that of California there’s a lot to go around.

We arrived in the afternoon at at the Ingenia Holiday Park in Broulee. We were pretty wiped out when we arrived – the day and half in the sun up north plus the overall stress of getting used to the van had put us on edge and in need of some electricity and laundry. We checked out the local tide pools, then crashed out. After a decent nights’ sleep, we decided to hang out for another night. Good call. We had a very simple day.

We took a long walk along the beach until we got to town. Right off the beach there’s a Little Free Library, with a dedicated kid’s hutch. Score!

Town is a small general store, chemist, and the Broulee Brewhouse. When we got to the pub it was time for a late lunch, so we settled in for an antipasto bucket, fries, and some delicous beer. The brewery was still very much under construction, and is made mostly of shipping containers. Turns out it was founded by two friends who liked to play tennis and had nowhere to go afterwards, so they got some land and built a brewery. Good call – it’s a great place to hang out.

Another family showed up with two kids in tow, the inevitable happened, and we ended up there until early evening.

And that led to a walk back along the same beautiful beach, feet in the water, collecting shells, etc.

The next day we lit out for Eden, stopping for lunch in Bermagui and checking out the Blue Pool along the way. It’s a man-made saltwater pool, very cold.

Bermagui has a nice little indie commercial strip, where we picked up some local sourdough and beautiful lamb chops for the grill that night. We stayed in the town of Eden, across from Aslings Beach. Same basic idea as Broulee – long, beautiful, nearly deserted. Aslings was the best beach we’d been to for shell collecting – Fiona was very happy.

This was my second time using the outdoor van grill – as you can see, it’s not so much a grill as a grill plate on top of an outdoor stove. It works OK for searing, but cleanup is pretty messy, because everything collects in between the ridges and you can’t clean until it cools down. The results were delicious, though. There are a couple of other posts brewing here (Australian grilling, and the incredibly high base level food quality that we’ve seen on this trip), but I’ll let ’em cook for a bit.

The next morning, we said goodbye to the coast and headed to the mountains!