11^th December 2016 (Sunday) – Batemans Bay to Gosford

Batemans Bay to Gosford

We needed to travel north of Sydney and decided that it would be better to travel around Sydney and through its suburbs on a Sunday when the commercial traffic and the roadworks would causing fewer delays. This proved to be a reasonable assumption and the trip went quite smoothly. The route has got a lot of new roads and a long and complex by-pass being built around the Foxground & Berry area to link up with dual carriages to the north. Some of the roads north of the region and leading onto Gosford travel along sections of roads that cut through substantial rock formations that look formidable.

We stayed the night in Waterview in Gosford, just off the Central Coastal Highway, and as always the website always looks more attractive than the real accommodation.

I discovered that I could use by mobile phone to send and receive phone calls on Telstra using the data stream in a feature called HD, which is available on my mobile (Samsung Galaxy 4S mini). This is much like the approach adopted by Facetime and Whatsapp, except it doesn't require the installation of a separate application. I tested out the HD approach with the help of my cousin's husband in Melbourne. HD appears to give me the same functionality as a normal phone and will hopefully allow me to benefit from the wider coverage of Telstra compared with others such as Optus and Vodafone.