Camping at Tinaroo

This weekend just gone was a long weekend for the Labor Day public holiday on Monday (May Day). Rather than waste it around the home doing much needed jobs, we decided to go away to Tinaroo for the 2 nights. Trev & Kelli and Graham & Karina wanted to come with, so it had to be somewhere 2WD friendly. Since we had such a good time at Kauri Ck last year, we booked in there again.


We left early on Saturday morning in order to bags a good camp site. Even though there's only so many camp sites at Kauri Ck (and they all need to be pre-booked online), we had reason to believe that NPWS were overbooking the sites. Leaving early proved to be a wise decision, since there was only one campsite still available when we arrived at 9:30AM (despite us actually booking 3 sites!!!). People continued to roll in throughout the day, with many needing to set up camp on a spare bit of ground, instead of at a dedicated campsite with a level pad and a firepit. I know I'd be cranky at NPWS if I was one of those people.


After getting our site together, we strung a number of tarps together to provide some shelter from the expected rain. The BOM had been forcasting rain towards the end of last week, which hadn't yet arrived, but they were still promising would come. It eventually arrived Sunday midday, and stayed around all afternoon and evening. Not heavy rain - just very light, swirly, misty style rain. Just enough to make you damp, wet the grass and threaten to collapse our dodgily-errected tarps. Dodigly errected or not, we were glad we had them, and had taken the time to set them up in the dry.


As always, we ate like kings all weekend. The girls whipped up a camp oven roast on Saturday night, which fell prey to some over-zealous cooking, and ended up rather well done. At least the middle of the meat was edible, and that's more than I could say for the potatoes (shown above in their foil wrappings). Whilst disappointing, we know what we did wrong, and it was just laziness that caused us not to check it earlier. Sunday night Jess made up some of "Roothy's Cheesy Balls" from a 4WD Action DVD - essentially beef and pork mince rissoles, with a cube of cheese in the centre. They were the hit of the weekend, and well worth the messy preperation!


In amongst a lot of sitting around and not doing much, we managed to do a couple of easy bush walks around the campsite and into the rainforest.




Of course, being Tinaroo on a long weekend, there was more than a couple of ski boats out and about all weekend. As we later found out, the Wake Board Nationals were being hosted over at the Fong On Bay campsite, just across the lake from us. Thanks go to them for the fireworks display on Sunday night!


Special mention must be made of the little tinny with the bimini top in the photo above (it's the one on the right). Despite being a flat-nosed punt (IE, not a pointy nose, but a blunt, square nose) with the smallest outboard you could buy hung off the back, it didn't stop all weekend. It spent 3 days continually pulling little kids around the dam on tubes behind. When you got up in the morning, it was already working hard, and only pulled in at dusk when then light went - after which the ski gear was disconnected, and it headed back out with some fishing rods. Goes to show that you don't need a million bucks just to have a blast out on the water.

Despite the rain, we all had a great time. Was good just to get out of the house and away from all the home chores that usually consume a weekend. The rain even held off on Monday morning just long enough for the tents and tarps to dry out, and we could pack them away dry. No sooner had we got the cars packed and started to head home, than the rain started again. Good timing!

Next time we hope to venture a bit further away from the crowds. Trev might be (finally!!!) buying a dual cab Hilux this week, assuming it's RACQ report checks out. So we might be able to start venturing out to the more interesting places that require 4WD access! Fingers crossed on that one!

2009-05-05, Camping at Tinaroo