We woke up at our usual 5:30am, had breakfast and were on the road just after 7:00
Our destination today is the Charlesworth Bay Beach Resort in Coffs Harbour. We have approx 475kms travel I have booked a standard studio room as it is just a one night quick stopover.
We had a really good run south with quite light traffic most of the way. We only had some stop start traffic on the southern end of the Gold Coast.
I planned out first stop at a bakery I found just south of the Gold Coast. The plan was to buy a loaf of fresh bakery bread and perhaps something to eat and have a cup of tea overlooking the river.
We arrived in Chinderah at around 9:30, found the bakery and a parking spot. It looked very busy and when we got the shop itself, we saw that there was no bread left at all ☹️ and the pastry and cake cases were very empty. It certainly is a popular place. We decided to just have a cuppa by the river and keep heading south. We had to drive further up the road to turn around and in doing so, we found a great picnic spot.
We had a lovely 20 minutes or so before heading south again. A few minutes later, we needed a rest stop and exited the highway thinking we might have a short drive to find a service station. And it turned out, there was service station right off the exit. I realised that this particular service station was a Coles Express store and we were able to pick up some milk for our next day.
The next stop was to be Ballina, I wanted to find a bakery for bread to make sandwiches for lunch. A drive up the main street and we duly found a Brumby’s bakery and a loaf of nice fresh bread. A look at the map showed a park not far away, so we stopped and had our sandwiches and a cuppa
Back on the road heading south our next stop was a rest stop of the side of the highway. There are many of these rest areas on the Pacific Hwy and they were all being well used.
We reached our destination around 2:00pm, checked in and settled in for a quiet night before turning in early, ready for another 400km drive tomorrow.
