Blue Mountains – between Jenolan Caves and Oberon

20 -  22 April 2015

The car was due for it’s 10 000km service so we booked it in at Lithgow, with the intention of looking for accommodation in the area once we arrived there. The traffic heading towards the city was very heaving – it was raining and there had been a truck accident on one of the other motorways, so there was extra traffic on the M2 - thankfully going in the opposite direction to us. We stopped for morning tea and a look around in Leura. It was really cold and drizzling rain – not very pleasant walking around the village, but nice and warm in the café and shops.

We arrived in Lithgow at exactly the time we had the car booked in for, and the odometer read 10001km. Don’t think we could have done that if we’d tried! We left the car, rugged up and walked to the nearby shopping centre for lunch and to pick up supplies for the next few days. We had hoped to get in to a cabin at Capertee National Park, but it was unavailable so we settled for our second choice – Jenolan Cabins. After collecting the car we drove back down the highway to the turnoff, then along the road towards Jenolan Caves.

The road is ok until the last few kilometres before the caves – then it becomes very narrow and really windy. You cannot take a caravan on this road. The weather was awful and we were glad to arrive at the cabins, about 6km past the caves. It was raining and blowing an arctic wind, but the fire had been lit in the cabin, so we were soon warm and cosy. We were told snow was a possibility and we believed it. The weather outside was deteriorating rapidly.

We decided not to venture back to the caves – driving on a wet, narrow, windy road while it was blowing a gale was not my idea of a sensible thing to do. Instead we settled in for a day by the fire. As the day wore on we heard more and more news about the appalling conditions in Sydney, Newcastle and the Central Coast. We were glad we had left Sydney when we had, but felt for friends and family in the affected areas.

On Wednesday morning, as we were packing up to move to, we heard the dreadful news that there had been lives lost, and that more storms were expected. Time to head west, hopefully into better weather.  It was still raining and really windy so instead of driving back through Jenolan Caves, we headed towards Oberon, where we stopped for coffee, before travelling into Central New South Wales.