(June 25, 2020 – written by Dave)

We’ve had a lovely rest day here in Yamba but for sure, the best thing that happened today was the finest morning tea ever. Late morning we wandered down the waterfront, past the marina to the nearly world famous Yamba Prawn Shack. They sell pretty much nothing but prawns. And there are no farmed prawns here, all fresh, all caught in the ocean off Yamba the night before. You can’t get any fresher than that.

For the record, morning tea is a snack taken sometime in the morning between brekkie and lunch. It would be called a second brekkie if you have anything substantial. If you just have a snack, then it’s just called tea. We rarely have tea for morning tea, it’s just snack time really. Sometimes we’ll have a coffee with the snack.

Well today we had delicious Yamba prawns for morning tea. They are pretty rich so it’s probably moving towards the level of second brekkie but who eats prawns for brekkie. So we are calling it a Yamba Prawn morning tea. I peeled all the prawns but we both ate them. Nancy likes them but really, this was my treat and she’s a good sport, so I get to do all the cleaning (Senior Editor’s note – good trick, huh?!?). Anyway, they were fantastic and one of our (perhaps my) best morning teas ever.

Yamba prawns are famous world wide – in prawn eating circles. The town was founded in the mid 1850, mainly to harvest timber. By 1880 fishing had been added as a major industry. Based on the number of trawlers we’ve seen heading to sea in the evenings, the fishing is still going strong. Today tourism and sugar cane have been added to fishing. There’s a real nice vibe here – not too busy or too sleepy – and they have the prawns.

We didn’t get up to too much else other than eating here on our rest day. In addition to the prawns, we had ice cream, pies, coffee (twice), smashed avo on toast with poached eggs and finally a pizza. I’m not sure but that might be our quota for fun food for the month. We love riding our bikes and being able to eat anything we want!

We weren’t complete slugs today however. This arvo we managed a walk out around Hickey Island hoping to see some dolphins up close. We didn’t see any but got some more nice sunset photos. We managed to get our laundry done (yeah, clean underwear) and get sorted out for the next few days of riding.

We’ll restart the northward journey at 9:30 tomorrow morning – hopping a ferry over to Iluka. Feels like a very civilized time to start a ride. We only have some 65km to ride so there could be time another Yamba prawn morning tea. I’ll probably be on my own on that one, riding after prawns could be pushing Nancy just a little too much.

Sunset overdose follows:

PS: thanks for all the tips Leonie – it was almost like having a tour guide even though you weren’t here.