A Cool Coast, NSW, On the Road

A Cool Coast – Rolling in to Murbah

Day 9 Sunday 22/6/2025 Bellingen to Murwillumbah (Murbah to the locals), 10 – 21 degrees

Well so much for the music festival last night, all we could hear was one solitary guitar if we listened hard. During breakfast we see horse floats arriving. What a shame we’ll miss the action.

We’re on the road by 8:30 with a long drive ahead of us, but thankfully it’s all motorway. It’s good to see that several more chunks of the Coffs Bypass have been completed as this is the last piece in the Pacific motorway between Sydney and Brisbane. We had never noticed before that there isn’t a highway service station between Coffs Harbour and Ballina (roughly 200kms), and when we do stop for fuel at Ballina the BP is wall to wall with people and cars. All hell bent on filling themselves and their cars. After a lot of yelling at the GPS (we know the way better than she does, so why haven’t we just turned her off? The entertainment that’s why!) we roll on into colourful Murwillumbah, through sugar cane with the wide and innocent looking Tweed River beside us. As always, we marvel at the fearsome beauty of Wollumbin Mt Warning.

The cheery and welcoming Murwillumbah Showgrounds caretaker asks us to spread the word that they are open again after the Cyclone Alfred floods in March. It seems that every time we visit they’ve just cleaned up after a flood. That bloody Tweed River!

I’m dishing up our dinner when Woody realises that he’s lost his car keys. We drop everything and start searching about in the dark, the lawns, inside the van, outside the van and under the car until I find them hanging on the TV cable. That’s right the TV cable, where, he has been hanging them of late, to get reception, which I might add we haven’t got tonight.

The belated dinner is a prawn and pea gnocchi that has now lost some of its pizazz. The evening activity is twiddling the aerial and trying to make the picture look less like an eye chart.

Murwillumbah Showgrounds, look no water!

Accom: $ 35.00, Power, water, dump point, toilets and showers.

Fuel: $60.01, Towing Kms: 307Kms

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12 thoughts on “A Cool Coast – Rolling in to Murbah”

    1. Welcome to the 1950’s rabbit ears and all. The caravan aerial lays on the roof while travelling and the TV gets the top spot in the bed, under the covers. At each destination we put the Tele on its adjustable arm, wind up the aerial, consult the location of the nearest comms towers on an app, and proceed to turn the aerial to face that direction. We then politely ask the TV to tune itself to that signal…and pray. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. There are more automated systems but it’s not worth upgrading our van at this age ( ours or the van’s).😉

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      1. That reminds me of cutting an aerial to the correct length to get the best reception for The Home Service on our valve radio! For optimum signal strength, it had to be a quarter wavelength, so 375 metres in that case! Much more fun than these modern self-seeking and tuning gizmos!

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      2. On one trip, one of the guys had satellite TV. There we all were in the Victorian high country standing under a tree in the rain watching the previous night’s MasterChef from a Brisbane channel on his outside TV. Is that a definition of cold comfort?

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