A Mellow Day Until WHAM! -- Wed., Nov. 21

What a nice mellow day today. Bob got up early and went running along the coast and over headlands. He had a great time and beautiful weather, saw kookaburras and some other birds.

I slept in. When I got up, I wrote my blog from yesterday.

Around 1:45 p.m. we headed out to the Info Centre to find out information about Wedding Bells Falls. It's supposed to be very close to Coffs Harbour, according to Google, but we couldn't find specific directions to it. The people at the Info Centre didn't know either. We gave up on that waterfall as the Info Centre staff were going to send us over to the forestry department. It wasn't that high on our list.

Instead, we headed over to the North Coast Botanic Gardens in Coffs Harbour. So far in our two weeks here, this is my favorite botanic garden! It is divided into many different gardens or woodlands. We spent 2-1/2 hours following paths throughout the garden.

We particularly enjoyed the Sensory Garden, Mangrove Swamp, Nature Trail and overall scope. It's a very well-laid-out garden. To his credit, Bob came with me and enjoyed learning about different flowers, plants and trees. He also was chief spotter of the land mullet (a large form of skink). We couldn't believe how big these land mullets are. We saw two today, both of them big. The biggest was about two feet long.

Land mullet (skink)

A number of birds were visible and I was able to capture some in photos; however, due to the limitations on our internet MB usage, I cannot post all of them at this time. I will have to wait until we have unlimited usage again.

I do want to share the photo of the kookaburra. He was sitting in the sun and his wing showed a blue iridescence.

Laughing kookaburra.

After the botanic garden, we took Coramba Road up through the hills to the villages of Coramba and Nana Glen, just for a look. We drove a 50 km loop through eucalypt forests and came back down to Pacific Hwy 1 at Sapphire Beach, then headed south into Coffs Harbour for dinner.

I was driving across town on Hogbin Drive which bypasses the main highway through town. At one of the rotaries, there was a family of four waiting to cross at the curb cut. I slowed down and stopped to let them go. The guy behind me did not. WHAM! He hit our rental car without stopping. I could see him coming in my rear view mirror and that he wasn't going to stop. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't go forward because the family was just about to step out into the street.

The guy who hit me stopped and gave his information. He did NOT have insurance. Luckily, we purchased the maximum coverage insurance. The hatchback will not open and the rear fender was damaged. A very nice elderly gentleman stopped and said he witnessed the accident and gave his name and contact information. He also wanted to make sure we were okay, which we are, just freaked out a bit.

Here's a photo of the damaged car.

The white is part of the black truck's bumper embedded in the back of our rental.

Our witness is in the car ahead of ours. Hopefully we can get this taken care of at Hertz at the Coffs Harbour airport tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow afternoon we will meet some new blog-reading friends, John and Lib, who live about 35 minutes from where we're staying. They invited us for dinner and to feed the wallabies on their property. How cool is that?

Travel Bug out.