We hit the road again a couple of weeks ago on our way to Zoe and Shaun's engagement party in Melbourne. It is about 1100km to Melbourne from Port Stephens so we decided to make a bit of a road trip of it.
Our caravan is set up to enable us to free camp so we did a bit of research and picked out some likely spots to spend the night on the journey. These free camps are usually either country pubs which allow people to pitch up out the back and use the loos in return for the purchase of a couple of beers or a meal, or small towns that recognise allowing free camping will bring a bit of much needed business into the area. 

We had chosen Gunning as a potential stopover as it is right by the Hume Highway which is the freeway linking Sydney and Melbourne so off we set. The first part of the trip usually gets extremely tedious around Sydney where a connecting motorway tunnel seems to be taking an age to complete. At the moment traffic whizzes down the Pacific Highway then grinds nose to tail around residential streets to the north of the city before joining the freeway again. It must be awful for the people who live there as well as being dangerous, we often hear on the news that a lorry has lost control and ploughed into a front garden so the sooner the tunnel is finished the better for all concerned.

 It was not too bad today however and we made pretty good time, arriving at Gunning in the late afternoon. It is always a good idea to have a couple of alternative stopping places in mind when choosing a town for the first time as they are not always quite as advertised but Gunning was fine. The free camping spot was the recreation ground (home of the Gunning Roos rugby team - or football as they call it here) and there were about 6 other caravans already there. It was also home to a group of Crimson Rosellas, a new bird for me to tick off in my book. 

Gunning is a good example of a small town that has been left for dead by the construction of the new motorway. The old Hume Highway passed through the centre of the town bringing business to cafes, hotels, pubs and shops but now the road bypasses Gunning so the town council have been very forward thinking in encouraging visitors by offering a free place to stop. We had dinner in the pub, where they do a cheap special every night (tonight's was $10 schnitzel) and almost all the other caravanners were in there eating too, and it was the same with the coffee shop the next morning.

 Like many Australian country towns, Gunning has beautiful old buildings. The garage was my favourite closely followed by a tiny museum which had a notice on the door giving a phone number to call if we wanted to look around. Gunning also has something I am starting to learn to expect in every small town - a mysterious art shop that never opens but has strange artwork inside when you peer through the windows. This one had various pieces made of milk cartons and old broadsheet newspapers (?) 

 Back at the recreation ground we saw a sight which demonstrated how an Australian man will always find a use for a ute, this time for exercising his horses!