He'd drive a 22-seater bus, leaving Canberra on Friday evening. We'd have pies at Braidwood. Back then the bakery was much smaller but always worth a stop.

Dad could've driven from Canberra to Tuross blindfolded, he did it so often over decades.

But for some of the dads and boys, the trip was their first over the mountain and down to the beautiful area of the coast south of Batemans Bay. So, Dad would play tour guide for much of the trip. He'd have an attentive audience, remembering that in those days when it got dark you didn't have a backlit screen to occupy you, even if you were lucky enough to own a Game Boy.

Pooh Bear's Corner up on the Clyde was one of the obvious points of interest and Dad would talk about its supposed origins as a World War II munitions store, designed to be blown if the Japanese invaded Batemans Bay.

It was a bit dodgier back then, without the polished charm of its wooden sign. A pair of reflectors were stuck in the back of the cave as eyes so by night you could imagine Pooh looking out at you. People deposited soft toys, hand-painted signs and, I can see from a photo in our archives, cans of beer. For some reason I've strong memories of an ant-covered tub of honey someone had left behind as a gift for the bear.

That quirky spot is still much loved and it was little wonder people were so thrilled a few weeks back when an intrepid RFS crew shared proof it had survived the fires.

But back to the bus, and as we continued down the very windy road, Dad would tell stories (full of dad jokes for the dads), especially his own origin stories of the towns we passed through.

He'd do a good five or 10-minute set up each time, a tale as embellished with twists and turns as the road itself. And then he'd finish with a punchline.

There was the one about the long-suffering woman named Nelly who lived down at the bottom of the mountain. Nelly's husband Douglas liked a drink but banned her from touching his Black Douglas whisky, because, he said, it had his name on it. So Nelly went down the hill to the Steampacket Inn, bought herself a bottle of gin and put her name on it. And so she said to Douglas, "hands off, that's Nelly's gin".

"And that's how Nelligen got its name," Dad would say, trying to keep a straight face.

One I remember too well had to do with a man who lived down past Batemans Bay, who'd grown a bushy moustache to the annoyance of his wife. She tried everything to get him to shave it off. In the end there was an ultimatum: "The mo goes or I go!". The bus would be filled with laughs and groans as we passed on through Mogo.

Last and, yes, certainly least was the tale of a boy named Ross who'd gulp his food down without chewing. His parents would shout at him at the dinner table "Chew Ross!". And so that's how we got Tuross, Dad would say, turning off the highway and cracking himself up one last time.

These were great times in my life and my family albums are scattered with coast memories from those weekends, as well as family holidays.

There's a pic of me, my mum and sisters in white gowns and hairnets before a tour of the Bodalla cheese factory. There I am inspecting the day's haul on a fishing boat in Batemans Bay. There in the surf with the background of the single Norfolk pine on the Tuross headland, before it was vandalised and replaced.

I've been on fishing tips out past the tollgates with an elderly relative at the entrance to Batemans Bay. My random - and these days perhaps not entirely legal - catch was wrapped up in plastic and stuck under the Murrays bus with the bags for the trip home. By the time it was back in Canberra, it wasn't judged fit for the table.

We'd sometimes go further down the coast, stopping in villages like Tilba Tilba. We had family friends on a dairy farm near Cobargo, inland from the coast. They lived in a beautiful, big farmhouse, whose setting up against bushland was so nice my Dad painted a picture of it. Sadly, he showed a photo this week of it flattened by the fire that hit that district. Only the chimney remained.

A lot of happy memories of the coast came back to me this week when the Kings Highway reopened. It'd been closed five weeks, and psychologically and practically this has felt a very long time. It has been like cutting off an artery to the South Coast and its communities.

Like many, I was down at the coast at New Years with family when the fires hit. We abandoned our Mollymook holiday home to join the evacuation on the Friday morning before the second of those two terrible fire days.

That evacuation of tourists was important to get as many people as possible out of harm's way while the crisis was at its peak. But the impact of a tourism season lost is being felt all along the coast. Businesses have closed and more will sadly follow.

Now the fire threat has died down, and the road is open, the coast is calling us all back down.

This weekend, I hope many of you are reading this down there, spending up and in doing so helping the people of that beautiful part of the world start to recover.

They've needed us and the spending money we bring with us, and yes, we've needed them.