Stewarts Crossing Camp - Charleyong

With Christmas fast approaching, and having made the decision that we would be staying put over the silly season, we realised that time was running out to squeeze on more camp in before the Christmas Holidays would be upon us.

So we picked a weekend, and for a bit of variety put out an open invitation to the school community to come and join us for a weekend away.

The beaut thing about the camp was it is under an hour and a half from home, on a bend in the Shoalhaven River with a sandy beach and good swimming hole.  It is also accessed via a dirt road, keeping the majority of punters away - and access after a lot of rain can be 'interesting' as we found in March this year.

The bad (for the majority of punters) is that there are no facilities - not even a pit toilet.  So we got around that by packing the ensuite tent, a shovel and a treat for us - a loo seat from Ray's Outdoors.

The forecast was for 36 degrees on the day of our departure - which reduced our numbers a bit due to a few people balking at the heat.  It was a bit of a shame really, as we had a ball.

The Camp... But wait til you see the river...

Do Terracans Float?

It has been a long time coming, but it was with unbridled joy that we headed out of town last Friday with the camper in tow, destination Shoalhaven River.  We were aiming for a camp we had spotted on our last adventure to the coast, and we now had it on good authority that there was an all weather access road from the west that would get us there.

With all the rain recently, we had heard that Oallen Ford had been up to 1.6 metres underwater.  Our camp was a little further upstream, and we weren't sure what to expect.  It was evident however that some large amounts of water had been over the road in places... and a few kilometres short of our destination we came across our first crossing.  It turned out that this was the easy one!

Thankfully a wade across confirmed there was a concrete base, and even more importantly the approaches were still in place.  The boy's were excited and I had to make a second trip with The Little Fisherman on my shoulders to take photos of our splash.

The two boys provided plenty of advice...

Before we sailed through... Mr Six and a Half taking the photo

We then ambled along into our camp... and what a camp we found.