The caravans, boats, trailers packed with all the paraphernalia necessary for a good holiday weekend away – surfboards, bicycles, fishing rods, kayaks etc have left our roads and the heaving mass of humanity that invaded our little country town has dispersed, back to the 9 to 5 of everyday life and leaving us feeling slightly discombobulated after the sudden change to our usual life. The shops and cafes are no doubt simultaneously overjoyed at the influx of cash and in need of a holiday themselves after a 4 day invasion of out of towners.

We personally spent a lovely few days with the Swiss side of our family who came to visit The Meadow complete with a tent, slackline, raclette machine, plenty of the bubbly stuff and even cheese all the way from Lausanne!! Michel very kindly offered to cook us lunch and we enjoyed the very traditional, simple and tasty raclette overlooking the paddocks. My nephew LOVES the great outdoors and chose to camp in the garden and make the most of it while he could. He also practises slacklining which is fabulous for your core strength and he even managed to get Tommy up for a trial, beer in hand for balance!! We enjoyed some great food, lots of laughs and chats about “the old days growing up” and were grateful to spend some time together with family over the Easter long weekend.

 

I had spent a lovely week prior to Easter enjoying a real variety of activities, I seriously think there is more to do down here than in Sydney sometimes! We went to a concert at The Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre to see James Reyne, the lead singer of the popular band from the 80s/90s – Australian Crawl. We really enjoyed the evening with him singing acoustic versions of his old songs. He is still a great singer and managed to get everyone joining in, including a whole load of young people who wouldn’t have even been born when he was at the height of his fame!!!!

The very next day a few of us ex Sydney girls decided to ‘get our culture on’ and went to an enjoyable afternoon organised by a local organisation called Berry Conversations. They arrange for people to come and ‘converse’ with the audience from very diverse backgrounds, politicians, historians, artists, actors and in this instance journalists – Charlotte Wood, a prize winning author and Susan Wyndham, the former literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. They chatted about how their careers evolved and the opportunities that came their way in an era of women struggling to reach the same heights as their male counterparts. It was a very interesting afternoon, not the least for me because they both talked about HOW they started writing, how to get to the NEXT stage and eventually produce a novel. I came away inspired to perhaps at least go to a creative writing workshop and see what I can come up with!! Thanks Girls!

The next day I was back on the road as I had to see someone in Vincentia, a little town on Jervis Bay that I had so far not visited. As it was so close to Hyams Beach and it was a mid week day prior to the hordes arriving for Easter, I took the Choccy Drop down for a walk along it’s pristine white sand beach. Touted as one of the whitest silica sand beaches in the world and truly beautiful. Sadly it’s very beauty is almost killing it as the crowds arrive en masse most weekends and EVERY major holiday this tiny village is bursting at the seams with people and cars. There are in fact many many other pristine white sand beaches down here and the 100 beach challenge has been set up to encourage people to explore some of the other Jervis Bay beaches instead. So many equally beautiful beaches to choose from….Wairo Beach, Burns Bay, Snake Bay, Meroo, Culburra, Callala, Depot or Cave Beach. However, you can see from these pictures why Hyams is so well loved, the colours are truly amazing.

I also enjoyed a fun day with my friend Leigh on a Mushrooming Foraging trip with wild food educator Diego Bonneto. He is a jaunty little Italian man with a passion for plants as medicine and seasonal wild food eating. We met him in The Southern Highlands in Penrose State Forest for a very interesting talk about the how, why and where of wild mushrooms. I never knew that mushrooms were actually the flowers of the mycelium fungus which runs underground and then when there is a perfect syncronicity of dampness and nutrients the mushies appear! We were specifically hunting for pine mushrooms as we were in a pine forest and were amazed that they were popping up everywhere, even in and around the carpark area! We found saffron milk cups, slippery jacks, grey nights together with a few miscellaneous and non edible types.

Then we trotted off to The Balangalo State Forest, a normally reliable source of the pine mushroom but our dry and very warm early Autum meant we found VERY FEW of the little darlings. Our vision of going home with our baskets weighed down with several meals worth of mushrooms went out of the window and we realised that wild food foraging is actually hard work. You could spend hours searching for very little gain. We found some chestnuts and wild fennel and one of our group found a ghost mushroom. These are considered powerful by aboriginal people as at night, the fan-shaped mushroom gently glows a spectral green due to a chemical reaction between fungal enzymes and oxygen. This only happens for a few weeks a year, usually in mid Autumn and I can only imagine what the first people would have made of it thousands of years ago! The glow attracts bugs which then spread the spores thus ensuring its future.

So in lieu of overflowing baskets of foraged delights to take home, we ended up pooling our finds and enjoyed them sliced and fried in olive oil, garlic and parsley on top of some bread from the always amazing Bourke Street Bakery. Simple and bloody delicious!

 

So in the space of a few days I enjoyed a huge variety of different activities which were all very enjoyable in their own way. How lucky we are to be able to continue to learn new things (and re learn old things such as food for medicine and foraging) as well as enjoy such a naturally beautiful part of the world as the South Coast, from the shady pine forests to the green fields of our local dairy country and the white sands and azure ocean of Jervis Bay. I pinch myself every day that this is my new home. Life doesn’t have to stagnate as you age, you just have to keep connecting to new adventures and embrace all that life has to offer. Sieze the day people for you never know what lies ahead…..

I love this quote………………