We decided to go on a leisure weekend trip with friends and chose New Castle, as we haven’t explored it completely. We have been to Caves beach and Lake Macquaire earlier on a day trip, but didn’t explore beyond that.

We started from Sydney in the morning around 10am and reached a place “The Entrance”, in Central coast region. It was a beautiful spot with Tuggerah Lake on one side and the deep blue Pacific Ocean on the other.

We found few Pelicans(Australia’s largest water birds) on the water front, they looked huge, easily taller than the height of a 3-4 year old. The place is famous for Pelican feeding where a large number of Pelicans reach there from all around. We missed that sight as we were a little early and had to leave to reach our stay.

It was a fun place for kids too, with various games at the lake side.

We further drove to our Airbnb, located beside Blacksmiths beach near Lake Macquarie and ventured into the beach. Luckily, the water in the beach was not cold and we enjoyed our time the beach. Thinking about beaches, we realized that we visited many beaches around Sydney, but didn’t repeat a single beach in the past six months :). We didn’t plan for it, but it was just a coincidence that might break anytime soon and I am sure its definitely possible to continue this way, given the number of beaches here.

The colors of sunset sky over the beach and the moon rise looked beautiful.

We prepared our dinner and rested for the day after a couple of games in the night.

We woke up early in the morning to catch sunrise. This was my first ever beach sunrise. I tried hard to catch a beach sunrise in Vietnam which never happened and now that we were staying just beside the beach, I decided not to miss this opportunity.

Wow, it was a beautiful treat to eyes and I was filled with immense positivity after watching at the sun rising above the sea.

I never realized that sunrise can be very different from sunset. While sunset relaxes us and ends our day peacefully , sunrise fills us with hope and positivity to have a brighter day!

From there, we went on a short walk on Fernleigh Track. It was an abandoned railway line built to transport coal from Adamstown to Belmont. It was a pleasant travel route through a bush-land setting with links along the way to adjoining residential communities. It served as a good bike track for kids and adults 🙂

We stopped for lunch and shopping at Westfield Kotara and then proceeded back to Sydney by evening.

Overall, it was a good weekend trip and we felt rejuvenated at the end of the trip!