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Monday 6th January - Nowra to Goulburn

So off to Goulburn today. It feels like we have been here for ages. Sadly we can't go south, but I think we'll save that for when we do Tasmania. Down to 16.5 overnight and upto 25.9 during the day.

So due to Kangaroo Valley still shut by fire, we'll head to Kiama and then onto Goulburn. A trip our mate Google says should take us about 2 hours and 18 minutes. It's a 170km trip, so a distance that we may cover in a day.

The trip started out OK. Pretty flat and then the left turn at Kiama. We travelled on the Jamberoo Mountain Road. This climbs gently out of Kiama. We had been on this road before when we took pictures of the stone rock walls and Kiama. Jeeves then tried to take us up a mountain pass, that was unsuitable for trucks, buses and caravans. Are you getting the picture yet?.

So we travel to Albion Park, where we can finally turn left to continue our journey. We end up going along Macquarie Way which goes thorough Macquarie Pass. This road opened in 1898. It would have to be the windiest hilly bit of road, with no let up at all. Talk about a steep climb. It took us nearly 90 minutes of this driving as there were steep hairpin bends, climbs and curves most of the time. Some parts were barely double lanes.

From Wikipedia - Macquarie Pass links the Southern Highland town of Robertson to the coastal town of Albion Park, descending the Illawarra Escarpment, via a very narrow bitumen roadway, which has several single-lane sections and is mostly two lanes with double "no overtaking" lines. It is in the Shellharbour local government area. This section of roadway is very steep, and contains many hairpin bends resulting in buses and trucks needing to reverse on some of the bends. The pass is quite notorious for accidents due to its nature, and drivers and riders are required to be cautious. After heavy rain, the Macquarie Pass can be closed due to flooding on the top half of the pass.

So now have you got the picture.

I don't recommend this road to anyone to ever use, especially if towing a van. Trucks and vans have to use it and we could hear on the CB, trucks asking if any other trucks were coming up of down the 'hairpin', as obviously they need to use the whole road when turning. There was some beautiful rain forest we travelled through, but I didn't have time to enjoy it, even though we were only doing 20-30km per hour. There were some steep drops on my side of the car I can tell you. Heaven only knows what the road though Kangaroo valley would have been like. I don't know if we were lucky it was closed because of the fires or not.

Our one worry was that we may have to descend as steeply as we had risen, but this was not to be the case. This road was called the Illawarra Highway and it joined up to the Hume Highway north of Goulburn. From Kiama, (elevation 10m), we travelled to Robertson, (elev. 731m). The movie Babe was filmed here and it is also has the Big Potato.

Next major town was Moss Vale. This town even has a McDonalds, so guess what. I had a cheese burger for lunch. Moss Vale sits at 678m above sea level. From here it was onto Goulburn with an elevation of 702m. Next stop will be Gundagai, (232m), and then Albury at 165m. So we will be going down-hill somewhere.

We're staying at the Goulburn South Caravan Park. Now this is a very large park, but it features drive through sites and is about a three minute drive to the Big Merino. Roll on six o'clock as I need a drink. It has taken us nearly four hours to get here.




Heading to
Kiama.

Santa and his
reindeers.

Goulburn
Post Office.


.

We've
made it.


.

Childrens
play area.

Fires around
Nowra 07/01/2020.

Roads closed
Nowra 06/01/2020.

Fires around
Albury 06/01/2020.

Hannan
Street.