When all else fails a little doll will do it: 87. A big day out

Mariana and Cecile came along on Tuesday morning

While I had the car serviced

It was not known exactly how long it would take

So we decided to go for walk from the top left of the map to the bottom middle and back via the long headland to the right of picture.

Welcome to Newcastle New South Wales Australia.

Throsby Creek

If I were just a little taller

Before the British settled in Australia in 1788 and Newcastle itself in 1797, Australia belonged to Aboriginal nations. The Newcastle area it was the Awabakal nation. Along the riverside path one of the information boards acknowledges this and the names the places were known by before we renamed them after towns in the north of England. The area was first settled by convicts to mine for coal.

This is an offshoot of the Coquun River now known as the Hunter River.

The original intention was to bring Mariana's AG trail bike, but it's really heavy and guess who would have to carry it and it's rider when they decided they'd had enough, so we opted for a lighter set of wheels, Miriam's roller blades for Mariana and a finger skateboard for Cecile.

Pebblecrete is a little rough on mini wheels.

Something smoother

Cowper street underpass

Low tide.

Unused ferry dock, and the fleet of fishing trawlers behind that, we're finishing unloading their morning catch at the Co-op, mmm bracing sea breezes.

Wickham

Sculpture fish trap

Wickham train station

The train line has been cut at Hamilton station about 2 kilometres away west with intent of creating a light rail system possibly who knows when let's just say the cutting of the Newcastle line has been proposed since 1972 at various locations and was finally done at the end of 2014.

Oh that's right it's Autumn. We'd like to point out that every thing is brown and looks dead because it hasn't rained in a while. They did predict rain for Tuesday, I think it came late that night, until then we self watered on the humidity.