Venturing outside Sydney
The weather has been getting hotter all week and started off hot first thing today, but we'd planned to have a 'family excursion' up the coast to explore the area north of Sydney. We drove for just over an hour to the other side of the Hawkesbury river on the main motorway to the north, which started off busy but the traffic eased the further away from the city and it was a good road with many sections carved into the sandstone rock.

We came off at Woy Woy and headed for Pearl Beach, as we'd heard some good reports of this place, and arrived around lunchtime to a very hot beach - the temperature was in the mid-30s by now and the sand was baking hot. We all had a dip in the sea, which was cooling, although the waves weren't very good here and the sand much coarser than on the beaches closer to home.

We had lunch on the beach and then decided to leave as it was uncomfortably hot, so we started driving further north up the coast to find some other beaches, but then decided to get back onto the motorway at Gosford and head back home. The run back was good and it was probably lucky that we left early as a large bush fire started in the area several hours later which blocked the road and caused a long tailback - not nice in this weather!

We could see the smoke rising into the sky from our house and were glad to be back and using the pool instead! We'll have to try going further again on another cooler day!