Day 72 – Palm Beach & Paddle Boarding.

Palm Beach is about an hour or so north of Sydney so we got up bright and early and left just gone 9am. For those of you that don’t know this is where they film Home & Away, I came here the last time I came to Australia but obviously I wanted to come back as I didn’t end up seeing it all.

Unfortunately on arrival they weren’t there, so we didn’t get to see any filming. The famous beach is on one side and on the other side is where the diner is. We took some photos of both and they’ve changed the surf club since I was last there, it’s now two stories to actually fit in with Angelo’s being above the surf club, the only downside to this is that it used to say Summer Bay and Alf Stewart on the outside and now it doesn’t. We decided to leave the Lighthouse walk until after Paddle boarding as we weren’t quite sure how to get up there or how long it would take and we didn’t want to rush.

We headed down to Clareville Beach, which is where we met Tony who owns and runs the Avalon Stand Up Paddle. I’ve never done this before but it’s been on my list for a while. I really enjoyed it and was actually quite a natural at it. He taught us how to change direction, reverse, speed up etc. As well as standing up, we sat down and paddled, we even just laid flat on the board and used our arms like you would on a surfboard. We were out on the water for about 2 hours and I love when you finish something you just want to go back and do it again that was the exact feeling I got with this!

We got changed and made our way back to Palm Beach. Tony had given us a map and explained how to get up the lighthouse, which was super helpful. The walk up only took 20minutes and was easier than I expected, they’ve made it into a proper track so you can drive a car up there to make it easier for maintenance and for H&A to film up there I guess. The views were amazing and you could see quite far. We took a few photos before making our way back down the track. By this point we were both quite hungry and it was going to be rush-hour heading back into Sydney so we stopped nearby at The Barrenjoey House for a spot of fish and chips. Wow is all I can say; they were tasty as and filled the spot. We made our way back to Sydney arriving just gone 6.30pm, we were both knackered and would sleep well!