Keeping it mostly hillbilly with a brush of face powder in Sydney Town (Goulburn to Katoomba)

Dec 9, 2015 | breast feeding, edible weeds, raising boys | 6 comments

We hung around Goulburn until the evening, cooked dinner in the town’s central park,

before boarding a quiet, off-peak metro train where our big bikes would be less in the way and Zero less likely to be discovered. Hello little patient dog under there.

We haven’t been so hardcore on this book tour. If there’s the prospect of a day of riding beside heavy traffic and there’s a train line running near to our route, the train option has been fair game. While we climbed up to Marulan, Meg fed Woody by standing on her helmet. He was dead tired. So were we.

We arrived in Bundanoon and made camp in the dark, waking to this little idyllic park environment. Oh sleep, you magical medicine.

We headed to our favourite Bundanoon bike cafe,

and after reaquainting ourselves with the friendly crew there, Woody found a little scooter, dumped in some bushes. We got to work to make it a going concern again.

Not surprising, wheels have always fascinated our youngest, as they have our eldest. Back at home Zeph has become a madkeen downhill mountain biker and stunt dude.

Patrick’s brother, Sam, rode out to Bundanoon to meet us and we all rode into Moss Vale and unpacked our gear before the afternoon book event at The Moose Hub in Bowral. Our talk there was part of the Southern Highlands Green Drinks, where various different green groups merge once a month and share their different projects and approaches. Thanks for snapping some shots Uncle Sam!

Woody thought all his Chanukahs had come at once when our delightful host Nicole brought out the fruit spread. Thanks Nicole!

It was a short visit to the Southern Highlands. We had a full plate of things in Sydney to get to, including guerilla camping at a fine little harbour free camp (surrounded by billion dollar dog box apartments and poisoned harbour fish), picnicing with the Milkwood crew and their lovely garden produce which included fennel root, carrots, zuccinini, saw-leaf corriander, parsley, basil and capsicum all wrapped up in reusable beeswax cloths,

and visiting Lucas, John and Diego at Big Fag Press.

Diego Bonetto is a consumate communicator. Above he is showing off the Big Fag printing press to some local punters, below he sings the virtues of the plants that plant themselves.

Diego invited us to collaborate on a walk with him, and about 20 kindred spirits joined us along the Cooks River.

Wow, it still amazes us how much food can be found growing on a municiple lawn. After we finished our walk and cooked up a weedy horta dish for everyone to try, a group of landcare volunteers come in with plastic bags and trampled all over the precious sandstone ecology pulling out weeds. It was a remarkable spectacle of nativist ideology in action where an environment is stripped of the plants holding soil and sand from ending up as sediment pollution in the river.

We left this tragic expression of eco-purity and rode on a little further to hook up with the Bicycle Garden: a group of volunteers that regularly sets up a pop-up bicycle repair station in public areas to teach people to fix their own bikes. What an awesome social collective! We had lunch with these generous and knowledgeable folk,

before heading to SNO where Patrick spoke about his and Artist as Family‘s practice of permapoesis.

Then it was TV time. So many diverse communities. We were lightly powdered and went on the record at Channel 9 and Channel 7. We had to be on set at the Today Show at 7am, luckily Patrick’s sister Hen and her family live just around the corner making our early morning tent pack-up and ride a breeze. Thanks Hen and Ant and girls!

Our Sydney book event occurred at the delightful Florilegium book shop, owned and operated by the charming plant lover Gil, who generously loaded us up with books after our talk, read and Q&A.

It was a media circus in Sydney. An excerpt from one of Meg’s chapters was published in the summer issue of Slow Magazine. The theme for this bumper issue is resilience.

After Sydney it was rest we needed to pursue, so we hopped a train to Katoomba and headed for our infamous camp site where on the last trip we were visited by the Federal Police. The story appears in The Art of Free Travel.

Just a wee walk down from the camp is this little hidden billabong, a source of great pleasure and restoration.

This afternoon we speak at Gleebooks in Blackheath and then more rest and riding and visiting old and new friends until the new year and we point our two-wheeled caravans south and coastal. We wish you much rest in the coming weeks, Dear Reader, whether you’re a hillbilly, city-dweller, coast rider or other.

Giving, taking and making (from Jingellic to Goulburn)

Nov 30, 2015 | bike-camping, fishing, foraging, raising boys | 0 comments

Thank the stars we rested at Jingellic and ate the bounty of local critters the Upper Murray offered,

an idle few days cooking carp on walked-for wood coals and playing songs around the campfire prepared us for the 44 km slog all up hill,

to Tumbarumba. Hello cows! We guerrilla camped for three nights beside the town’s creek,

kinda hidden, kinda not.

We were invited to dinner at Geoff and Karen’s, who are fourth generation farmers we’d met on the first trip. Respectful debate concerning land use, economies and politics continued from where we’d left off in 2013. Back then Geoff was a climate change skeptic. But no longer.

We held a free foraging class, and identified around twenty species of autonomous edibles,

gathered up the best of what we found and demonstrated how to turn these free gems into desirable food.

We then gave a reading at Nest, and sold a swag of books. Yippee!

We’d heard the ranger was keen to catch up with us in Tumba, so we hightailed it to Batlow and hung out in the library where we met Robert, the town’s librarian, who went home at lunch time and picked us a bunch of his glorious asparagus. Thanks Robert!

We were offered a free camp at Greg Mouat’s apple orchard with permission to fish out the redfin from his dam. Thanks Greg!

We caught 5 mid-sized ones and added them to Robert’s asparagus for dinner, before bunking down for the night.

We stopped in Tumut for a little reading at Night Owl Books,

and took off along the Brungle Road to Gundagai where flashes of the old Wiradjuri spirits collided with newcomer glimmer.

We rode on to Jugiong, made camp again along the Murrumbidgee River where the water was clear enough to go spearing for fish.

Woody and Zero watched from the pebbly bank,

while Meg took a skinny dip.

Patrick was unsuccessful catching fish, but we did harvest stinging nettle and cooked up a bag of this rich-in-iron free medicine with pasta, olive oil, salt and lemon.

We woke to a billy of porridge and hit the Hume Highway.

A tedious, roadkill-marred ride brought us to Bookham for a rest, where two years earlier Patrick had pruned this little feral apple tree. He gave it another prune to encourage a habit for greater fruiting in the years to come. Go little tree, grow!

We schlepped into Yass after a deafening and hot 60 kms, pulled up outside the local land council and had a yarn to Brad, a Ngunnawal man. He told us about a local program set up to rid foxes and feral cats who are, he stated, wreaking havoc on the local tortoise population.

What’s remarkable is how many tortoises we’ve seen killed by cars and trucks since Gundagai. There have been at least 100.

We anthropocenes really are brilliant at kidding ourselves… More lambs; a better environment?

By observing the relationships between other animals —non-mediated earth folk— is it possible to reclaim for ourselves a place as ecological creatures, in relationship and not at war; where one-on-one interspecies killing is part of everyday life, but man-made mass death is not?

Eating a broad, local diet (such as these dianella buds and flowers, soon to be berries), can perhaps aid a process of becoming post-anthropocene. We believe that if we engage in our own resource gathering we can better be accountable to that which makes life possible.

Learning to forage plants that cultivate by themselves, produce food without the need of fossil fuels, mined superphosphate and excessive water inputs all contributes in being able to walk away from the Anthropocene.

We took this merry bunch of Canberra foragers out for a walk in a suburban park and showed them how much food lies just underneath their feet, before returning to Paperchain Books in Manuka for a talk and reading from The Art of Free Travel.

While in Canberra we stayed with an old friend of Patrick’s from undergraduate days. Tim treated us to his excellent cooking and a generosity that made us feel like we were back at home. Thanks Tim!

While in the capital we also got to stay with these two kind Warm Showers hosts Kerri-Ann and Michael, who shared their cycling stories and cooked us a lovely meal.

We left Canberra well rested and cared for and rode hard for 70 kms to Tarago to set up an unorthodox camp in their weird but welcoming little public park.

We didn’t linger, leaving early the next day for Goulburn where just before we arrived in this old sheep town we spotted fruiting African boxthorn berries to snack on.

We hope the thorns in your fingers, Dear Reader, provide delicious sweets and free delights. One of the lessons we’ve learned from the road is how the hardships of the day prick the joys, they are one of the same tree.

The art of free travel (the homecoming leg – Warburton to Daylesford)

Jan 11, 2015 | autonomous edibles, bike-camping, bushfires, community gardens, raising boys, stealth camping | 16 comments

We probably should have spent the day at Maya’s swimming hole on the Yarra,

as the second day of 2015 was a scorcher. But instead we travelled the relatively shady Warburton-Lilydale Rail Trail, coming across these osyter mushrooms (Pleurotus sp) growing on what looked like dead underground conifer wood.

Only we weren’t 100% convinced they were edible oyster mushrooms and as there was a tiny chance they could be the poisonous look-alike, glow-in-the-dark ghost fungus (Omphalotus nidiformis), which also grow on woody material (mostly eucalypts) we abandoned them before finding this great little Yarra swimming hole, near Woori Yallock.

The long hot evenings of summer have proven a little inconvenient for us weary, early-to-bed, early-to-rise campers, and daylight savings certainly plays havoc with our circadian rhythm.

In the past we have spoken about breast milk being one of the most important medicines in our medical kit, but another one we regularly resort to, and is equally free from the imperatives of capitalism, is good sleep. Patrick just couldn’t throw off the cold we all had over the past week and became really sick because of a relentless sore throat, which made swallowing almost impossible, thus cancelling out the possibility of the medicine of sleep for three nights. This was the result.

Not a happy camper! But we still had kms to cover if we were to get home to our chooks and ducks and garden, so wallowing in sickness was not an option. We had to push on, and on we travelled to Seville for another hot night,

followed by rain the next morning, a wet pack up and breakfast under the local footy ground shelter.

Zeph has been booming along during these last three months on the road. He has missed his mum and his mates and is eager to get to high school, but he is also present and bubbly and more than meets the challenges of each day, which are quite intense. Roadkill, aggressive drivers, rain, steep hills, healthy food (something he has an aversion to) and a dad who can be quite hard on him, have all been daily pressures that he has grown from.

Even though Zeph can be quite in awe of a certain motorbike or car that races past and will rib his ‘hippy’ parents about his love of these ‘cool’ motors (can something that goes so fast really be cool?), he will also, off his own bat, articulate his despair at what he/we see as the senseless mass death of animals brought about by an intransigent car culture in Australia.

Even though the endless roadkill has probably become progressively less shocking as our senses have hardened over 9,000 kms of cycled bitumen and gravel, we still have many moments that really choke us up. For the 2,800 kms we drove a rental car (our leg from Cairns back to Sydney), we didn’t produce any flattened fauna and drove with the utmost of care. But for all the 14 months on the road, bar those 11 difficult days in a car, it was really impossible to inflict much damage, even if we tried…

One of the few autonomous fruits we came across on this last leg, between Yarra Glen and Hurstbridge, is a species of passionfruit (Passiflora sp.), a prolific garden escapee that has taken up residence along the fence lines that run beside the roads in that region. Should be good bush tucker for locals in that area in a few weeks from now.

Having made up some kms we took up a stealthy residence in a park reserve in Hurstbridge and rested for two nights.

Zeph found a three-wheeled scooter lying around in the park and when Woody wasn’t on it he honed his mobility skills to the max.

A less significant but nonetheless useful medicine plant we’ve seen all over the country is petty spurge (Euphorbia peplus), otherwise known as radium weed.

It produces a milky latex sap that is good at ridding warts and liver spots. Be careful in applying this free medicine as it can burn the skin, and make sure you keep it away from eyes and internal parts of the body. Dabbed directly on the wart or sunspot over several days will generally get rid of these unwanted skin anomalies. They will form a scab and then disappear.

From Hurstbridge we rode a big day to Wallan, picked up some supplies and headed on towards Romsey. We found a little camp site along the way. The site sorely lacked water and thick shade and the heat of the afternoon prompted a nudist beach free-for-all to compensate.

We got away early the next morning after some bike maintenance where a tree branch and strap were used to make a hoist.

We’re going to miss the camaraderie of bike-camping life, although we will apply the lessons we’ve learnt to help each other in home and community life.

As we approached Romsey the land was tinderbox dry. It recalled for us the relatively recent 10-year drought and the feeling of becoming environmental refugees again as yet another extreme fire season develops.

Not far on from here a siren was heard and then the engine itself roared past and this uneasy feeling rendered itself concrete.

As we approached Woodend a fire raged near Kyneton and a storm brewed on the horizon. The effect was nothing but dramatic.

The rain soothed and cooled and came and went in a hurry, allowing a reprieve for our last night of our long trip.

After so many months, Zeph is a gun at packing up TJ (Tent Junior) and races Patrick when he packs up Big Bad Barry (the adults’ tent, named by three-year old Ruby back in Katoomba).

We stopped off at the Woodend Community Garden for a few breakfast berries,

and set off for our last day’s ride.

Near Tylden the rain was followed by a glorious rainbow.

And at Trentham we stopped in to Redbeard Bakery, where some of the best organic sourdough in Australia is made and where Patrick used to work and learned the art of sourdough. The delightful John Reid shouted us a beautiful breakfast and sent us on our way with five loaves. Thanks John! If all businesses were as green, ethical and generous as yours we wouldn’t be such ardent critics of monetary economics.

The loaves John gave were to share with some of our loved ones who gathered at the community garden (well, next door because of the rain) to cheer and greet us as we rode into our hometown of Daylesford.

We have been blessed by the countless folk who have followed our journey online and sent us well wishes for the entire way. Our dear friend Pete took us on a little tour of our beloved Albert St community garden,

life was brimming there, and the storm clouds were brewing so we hightailed it home with Cam, Tia, Jeremy, Arden and Jasper on their bikes,

to join other mates in our home garden that was lovingly tended by Matt and Yael and their kids while we were away. With such restorative rain, trees full of fruit and our teary, gift-giving friends it was such a smooth landing home.

After everyone left and the heavens opened for another deluge, we decided to set up our beds inside after all instead of setting up our tents in the backyard as we had planned. Then Patrick got to work cutting the legs off our kitchen table.

We’d been talking about doing this for months and it felt like a good first thing to do to bring into our home what we liked about camp life. Pete brought some crates over the next day as we’d mentioned to him we’re going to try to keep sitting on our sit bones and rid our house of the dreaded chair.

Another thing we came home with is a book deal with the Sydney publisher NewSouth Publishing, an imprint of UNSW Press. We are going to be busy beavers for the next several months getting a first draft completed of the book we are calling The art of free travel.

We really can’t thank you enough for your well wishes and positivity these last 14 months. It has been such a highlight and comfort to us to have you along on this journey. Although we are home now, we will still continue to do our work as community food activists and car-free advocates, only now from the one location instead of many.

Hills and thrills and possum stew (from Cobargo to Orbost)

Dec 22, 2014 | bicycle touring, family on bikes, raising boys, stealth camping | 7 comments

While staying with Ronnie and Phil on their farm just north of Cobargo we got to see up close what a small-scale commercial dairy looks and smells like.

Crippling regulations for producers means they are locked into ways of farming that don’t support best practice land management. We spoke with Ronnie about how regulations lead to large monetary loans, which in turn lead to putting more pressure on the land in order to service the accruing debt.

This is a common picture in regional Australia, the debt that is. Zeph hit it off with Ronnie and Phil’s son, Alexander, sharing a love of independent mobility.

And we got to go walkabout up in the hills in between the storms. Thanks so much Ronnie, Phil, Alexander and Eliza-Jane! We had such a restorative and nourishing time with you all.

Alexander rode with us the 6 kms to the Cobargo township,

on the morning of our talk at Sweet Home Cobargo,

where about thirty thoroughly decent folk turned up to hear us rant the pleasures and pressures of cycling, stealth camping and everything else we do to inspire the idea of a permaculture mode of travel, a node of which we found in this very edible pond.

The pond included bulrush, waterlily and lotus lily and was situated just below our night’s campsite,

which came about as a chance invitation from one of the punters from the talk. At the old butter factory east of Cobargo a little two day festival of music was occuring where a pig and cow were killed for the occasion and local vegetables roasted and laid out in beautifully primitive quarters while a band whose name we didn’t catch played old school rock n roll.

It was a loose night and we packed up the next morning a little tired,

thanked our hosts and headed out of town, moving an anthropogenicised wombat off the road so it could decompose in peace.

As we rode towards Bega we got a call from our friend Mel Pickering, who’d arranged our Sweet Home Cobargo talk, shouting us a picnic by the river with her family.

Mel used to live in our community and was involved in the early stages of setting up the community gardens, the food co-op and the Daylesford branch of Critical Mass. Mel is also an experienced cycle tourer. Thanks so much Mel, Dan, Max and Evan, your lunch and company were delicious! To top off our time together the boys made a raft by the river.

We certainly have been spoiled on the South Coast of NSW, and on this day it kept on getting more social when we headed to Ian Campbell‘s home to meet his family and the family of Autumn Farm Bega. Ian interviewed Meg on the radio. You can listen to it here, if you like.

So many inspiring stories on the Sapphire Coast and we were treated to a ferment fest at Ian and Megan’s home with Genivieve and Annie’s rhubarb wine, Ian’s Elderflower champagne and Meghan’s home-baked bread. Thank you everyone!

The following day we met a person who is putting all these great stories of human-scale action and production together in a fantastic magazine called Pip. Meet Robyn Rosenfeldt, telling her own narrative of the beginning of her beekeeping adventures:

We were cooked a delicious campfire dinner of Autumn Farm Bega chicken and home grown veg by Robyn and Alex and were joined by their girls Ruby, Ella and Indi and Alex’s dad Andrew.

We crashed out in their guest quarters and slept deeply until Woody rose with the roosters and got us up and packing, only to be stopped a few hours later on the road with some thankfully fixable bike problems. The worst part about this roadside fix-it job was being so close to traffic. Woody slept through the event.

It didn’t take us long to relax into the rhythm of cycle touring again, with a complimentary copy of Pip mag to propel us,

all the way to Love Street, Eden (what an address!),

where Dale and Jenni live, and where they are working on their new extensive covered orchard.

Dale and Jenni met us on the street in Merrimbula and invited us to stay with them. These two salt-of-the-earth-back-to-the-landers are growing their own meat and vegetables and brewing their own beer and lemonade.

We again benefitted from the nutrition of nurtured food and land. A former butcher and man of many skills, Dale threw us an impromtu knife sharpening workshop (we are kicking ourselves we didn’t video) and Jenni collected up a bag of home-grown produce to take on our way.

After such a social couple of weeks we were ready to head to the bush again and stealth camp for a bit at Quarantine Bay south of Eden.

We were really bloody exhausted but because of all the rain on the South Coast we needed to make up some kms.

For the first time in over a year we are working to a deadline. Our dear tenants move out shortly and we need to be home to feed the chooks and ducks and get Zeph ready for a life at secondary school (his decision) in January, the month of goats.

Where we breakfasted with the goats was also home to devil’s guts (Cassytha filiformis) or devil’s twine, a bush tucker more common in the north of the country and which comes with a toxicity warning as the seeds and skin of the berries can cause stomach cramps and even prove fatal if too many are consumed.

It was to be our last new found bush tucker before we reached our home state border,

an arbitrary line drawn by colonialists over the territories of Indigenous peoples with little regard. Nevertheless, it felt like a kilometrestone. With a wild storm brewing up hail stones and a radical temperature drop we knew we had crossed into Victoria and we set up camp in Genoa in good time.

We had some drip-drying to do the next morning,

before some more defensive riding on roads not that much better than NSW’s. It’s remarkable how many drivers will overtake a cyclist over a double white line, or what Patrick refers to as the doublewhiteAustralialinepolicy. The truck that almost collected us a few weeks ago overtook Meg and Woody on the crest of a hill and met another truck coming the other way. Who is the driver going to collect? Will he or she smash into a tonne of steel and potentially die or take the soft option and kill the cyclist?

We stopped before Cann River to check out the specials on eco tents not for sale along a rainforest walk,

before arriving in the town with terrible pies and great camp sites.

Zeph got busy making stick damper with some fairly ordinary Aussie flour,

and Zero found and put out of its misery a brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) that had been hit by a car. We were certainly not going to waste this tenacious life.

We stewed the possum with garlic, carrots, tomato, salt, pepper and a handful of buckshorn plantain (Plantago coronopus), the seed heads of which are mucalaginous and help thicken soup.

Over the five or so hours of slowly cooking our little brew our campsite grew. We welcomed Doris the vintage bike and her lovely rider Connor, a dancer from Leeds in the UK, with some damper and honey. Doris declined, while Connor relished the moment.

We invited him to stay for more damper and possum stew,

and camp with us. Just after dinner we welcomed another cycle tourist to our camp. Hello Nathan, delightful Kiwi. We are sorry there’s no more stew left to share.

With possum in our bellies we farewelled our new northbound friends and rode our biggest day (75kms) for quite a while, powering up the ranges and singing down the slopes to Orbost in Gunai Kurnai country, and found a stealthy campsite here,

behind this lovely oak tree in the town’s park.

We hope you too, Dear Reader, find a stealthy Summer solstice retreat where you can rest with loved ones.

Moss Vale to Hyams Beach (with a video recipe for eating garden snails)

Nov 28, 2014 | family on bikes, foraging, raising boys | 4 comments

We left Moss Vale with full bellies and much family cheer, but an aching to be on the open road again. The Illawarra Highway welcomed us with mostly broad shoulders.

Just before the little potato town of Robertson, Zero jumped bike and chased lunch down a hole. But he really needed some more skilful help – another Jacky, a feret or Andrew Ucles perhaps.

It will have to be spuds for lunch, then.

Just out of town we spotted some naturalised elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum) growing among the bracken fern (Pteridium sp.) – another edible, but only in a survival situation – and roadside weeds.

Great! Something to take to the Milkwood crew, now of Kiama.

We flew down Jamberoo Pass with our newly replaced brake pads smokin’,

and arrived in Kiama mid-afternoon. Patrick thought he’d try to spear some fish to also bring to the Milkwood table, but he only speared this estuary cobbler or catfish (Cnidoglanis) thinking it was an eel. These fish have large venomous dorsal and pectoral-fin spines that are capable of inflicting very painful wounds. He put this ugly but divine critter back in the ocean and watched it swim away.

We did collect a turban shell (Turbo undulata),

that we hammered open to cook at Nick, Kirsten and Ashar’s place. Hello Milkwood family! So good to meet you again after all these years.

The turban shell was, well, typically shellfish-like with a strong scent of pork as we cooked it in strained pig fat. We were blessed with an extended piggy feast that night: the pork was served up with bone broth noodles and our elephant garlic. A few days later we were to become intimate with the origin of that very local pork,

which we’ll get to shortly. The next day we walked around to the Boneyard, a famous surfing haven when conditions are right, and went in search of lunch. Before long Patrick speared what we think is a wrasse of some kind,

and Zeph took us on a short fish gutting demo. Thanks Zeph!

While at the Boneyard we munched on some Warrigal greens (Tetragonia tetragonioides),

noted (not quite ripe) cape gooseberries (Physalis peruviana),

and saw loads of the edible weed cobbler’s peg, otherwise known as farmer’s friend (Bidens pilosa).

We picked some wild brassica leaves and flowers,

and some pigface (Carpobrotus glaucescens) fruit,

and with foraged sow thistle, wild fennel and some leaf vegeatables and herbs growing in Nick and Kirsten’s new garden we made a salad,

to accompany the fish for lunch. It was a delicious and very local meal.

Milkwood had organised for us to speak at the Little Blowhole Café that night, where we shared our year’s story with about 40 peeps. There was so much to say, and so little time, and so many great questions!

Thanks Nick and Kirsten for hosting us! It has been wonderful to get to know you both and Ashar better. Two of the people who came along to our talk were the very farmers of the delicious pork we’d had the previous night and they invited us to camp at their organic farm in Gerringong. This is the view we cycled across, looking south to Gerringong. Pretty horrid, hey??

We arrived at Buena Vista Farm and Woody jumped straight into the strawberry patch. It was serious work.

And in that same patch were hundreds of snails (Helix aspersa) that Maarten, a dutch WWOOFer working at the farm with his partner Marlies, collected up and demonstrated how to turn into a valuable source of meat. Brilliant Maarten, we love experimental permies!

We had two precious days of exchanging knowledges with the Buena Vista crew. We learnt more about cell grazing chickens and cows and market gardening, and Patrick took a foraging tour over the farm, identifying a dozen or so common weed species including plantain, hawksbeard, dandelion, black nightshade, dock, chickweed, stinging nettle, fat hen, fleabane, spear thistle, sow thistle, clover, cobbler’s peg and amaranth.

After lunch we walked across a neighbour’s farm to the coast to go for a spear,

and brought back two fishy offerings for the dinner table feast on our last night.

The feast included locally farmed trout, which Buena Vista had traded for some of their meat birds, and roasted parsnips pulled straight out of the rich organic market garden soil. Like at Milkwood we were treated to the region’s finest fare. Thank you Fi, Adam, Henry, Tilly, Ivy, Holly the dog and the delightful (and knowledgeable) interns, Maarten and Marlies! Our stay at Buena Vista Farm was a true treat!

Before leaving the farm we realised we had a bit of a problem.

The seat post we had welded on the way up north in Gosford was showing signs of stress after about 6000 kms. Fi was going to Nowra on the morning we were leaving, so she kindly offered to load up her car with our panniers and we put the bikes on the train for the 18 km joy ride,

to Bomaderry station. Fi, who also took Zeph and Zero, met us there, where we bid farewell to this amazing woman, and rode across town to south Nowra where the alumimium welder Jason was waiting for us.

Only $20! Thanks Jason! We love not having a car! By the time we left the workshop it was 38 degrees in the shade. Zeph wished we did have a car. The heat surprised us, and so did this sign:

Wow, we’re that close to home. We struggled on the short and dangerous ride to Huskisson but were rewarded for our efforts at Shark Net Beach on Jervis Bay. Where else would you want to be on such a baking afternoon?

This south coast really is remarkable. We got the free-camping low-down from some friendly locals who set our course on a 15 minute bike ride south to Plantation Point, which from our tents looked like this:

The boys made themselves at home,

and the dawns pretty much emmulated this one:

Pure dawn porn! We settled in for four nights in our quiet haven. One of the joys of cycle-camping is being able to get away from cars and vans and into areas where their various pollutions can’t follow us. It was quiet at Plantation Point, the sleepy surf rocked us to sleep and created a perfect white noise to sleep past the little night sighs of our toddler and the sleep talk of Zero and Zeph. Ah bliss…

While at Plantation Point we spearfished and fished off the rocks with the remains of a bull shark some local fishermen had left behind.

Zeph wrote a synopsis of Lord of the Flies and answered the question: Put yourself on the island: what would you do differently?

We ate native violets (Viola hederacea), the flowers and leaves,

and rock oysters (Saccostrea glomerata),

and we started to document seaweeds,

before we moved on just 10 kms south to Hyams Beach where we continued our research on these common Australian algaes we really know nothing about.

We’re sure there is good tucker in at least some of these species.

If you know anything about edible seaweeds in Australia, Dear Reader, we’d love to hear from you.

Zero conducted his own research – chance canine encounters and coastal bird chasing.

We walked south along the white sand beach towards the navy college, musing, not on the education of young people in the business of man-made mass death, but on all the wondrous finds of regenerative life we came across along the way including this jellyfish,

American sea rocket, (Cakile edentula), which has thick succulent edible leaves.

beautiful marine jewellery,

and even more varieties of kelp.

Our walk was cathartic. Boys on a beach is a joy to behold; it doesn’t get any more uncomplicated.

That night we again snuck the bikes into the beachside bush, picked up a bag of rubbish in exchange for our camping fees,

waited for dusk and the departure of the daily beachfolk before we set up our tents, cooked dinner, put Woody and Zero to bed and lit a little evening fire to help us reflect on the past few weeks.

That’s about all from us this post. We’ll see you again shortly, Dear Reader. We hope you too have comfort and warmth from the love of kin and healthy ecologies.

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