The Rabbitts were finally back on the road again last week and off down to see Zoȅ, Shaun and Eddie for the first time in 9 months! Australia has been dealing with COVID outbreaks by closing state borders so we were ready in the starting blocks when the New South Wales/Victoria border opened on the 23rd. We usually take the caravan and make a bit of a holiday out of the journey but we wanted to get there quickly in case the border closed again, flying was out too because we did not want to get stuck if flights were cancelled for any reason. 

The journey down to Melbourne is long but pretty straightforward apart from a ghastly section through Sydney. The freeway enters the outskirts of the city and takes a painful, crawling route along residential roads with narrow lanes for, what feels like, forever. There are often accidents and it is not unusual to hear about a truck ploughing into a house or garden. It is a stressful bit of driving especially if towing the caravan and really dangerous for the poor people living there with trucks thundering past all hours of the day and night. Not any more though, while we have all been confined to barracks the Northconnex tunnel was completed. Instead of the one and a half hour schlep through Sydney (sometimes longer) the journey through the tunnel took 7 minutes! It was wonderful.

 Gundagai was our choice for an overnight stop on the way down because it is just over half way and right beside the freeway. The only thing I knew about Gundagai was that the Dog on the Tuckerbox poem was set there. There is a motorway stop at the Dog on the Tuckerbox with a statue of said dog sitting on the tuckerbox just like in the poem. You see people taking photos of their dogs sitting on plastic lunch boxes in front of the statue, all very cute. Or so I thought until I read the original poem, the line actually reads 'The dog shat on the tuckerbox' not sat as everyone thinks, not so cute now then. 

We had never visited Gundagai itself and were pleasantly surprised to discover it was extremely nice town surrounded by hills and with an interesting past. The early settlers chose to ignore warnings from the indigenous residents about flooding and built the town on the banks of the Murrumbidgee river.They suffered a couple of floods in the 1840s but the town was completely destroyed by a devastating flood in 1852. Over half the buildings in the town were swept away and over 75 people died. Two indigenous men, Yarri and Jacky, took to their canoes and saved 69 of the townsfolk. 

 Gundagai still floods but the town is located further up the slopes and the road is elevated as it crosses the flood plain. The original rail and road bridges can still be seen running alongside each other, it is hard to imagine how they ever supported cars, let alone trains. We stayed in The Bushman's Retreat Motel because we had Monty with us so were limited to pet friendly accommodation. It was ok, clean enough but really more of a tradies stopover than a family hotel. 

When we crossed into Victoria everything changed. There was a serious Covid outbreak in Melbourne and the state has had far tougher restrictions than we have been used to, They were successful though and had gone 30 days without a case by the time we turned up. The rule demanding mask wearing outdoors had only been relaxed the day before we arrived and masks were still mandatory inside any buildings. It made us realise how lucky we have been living in our little Covid free bubble in Port Stephens.

 After a wonderful few days at Zoȅ's we hit the road again for the long drive back. This time we had booked an Aibnb in Dalton, just outside Gunning and only 15 minutes from the freeway. There is not much in Dalton but the accommodation was splendid, a little completely off grid cottage to ourselves. It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere when we were actually only 10 minutes drive from Gunning and dinner at the pub.

We are back home now, it is 33C and I can hear a jet ski on the water so it is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. 

 I have been absent from blogging for a while now, mainly because it did not feel right joking about little country towns while they were fighting off bushfires. However, now I am in lockdown on my sofa and I can't go anywhere, it seems like a good time to look back on the last trip we went on, just before the fires took hold. 

Last October we set off along the Golden Highway through the Hunter Valley. It was lucky we left when we did as there were signs up along the road saying 'Road closed tomorrow for mine blasting'. We passed through the usual strange mix of vineyards and coal mines before stopping at Jerry's Plains for the night. Campers can stay for a donation and use the clean amenities, it is near a road but is a useful stop for us as it is only 2 hours from home. It is the done thing to spend some money in the town if a free or cheap camp is available but, in the case of Jerry's Plains, this was tricky as there was nothing there.

 The drought had  been going on for so long that everything was brown and even some of the gum trees seemed to be struggling but as we drove out of Jerry's Plains we quickly came to a series of extremely wealthy looking racing horse studs where, needless to say, the grass was lush and emerald green for miles and miles. There were some very sleek looking horses to be seen from the road but I guess they were keeping the Winx/Red Rum types well away from the grubby mitts of passers by. 

The landscape changed straight back to brown again once we left the horsey area and we rolled up at Gulgong Showground around midday, great place to stay, $12 a night unpowered with clean showers and toilets. Gulgong is an old mining town and was the home of Henry Lawson the renowned bush poet, when he was a boy. He and Gulgong featured on the first $10 note and the town seemed to have never quite got over it. There was a Ten Dollar Hotel, tourists could have their picture taken with their face on a ten dollar note, it went on and on. It was a splendid little town although not much appeared to be open on a Tuesday apart from the small supermarket with a cheese display that was offensive on many levels and an opera house where a group of children on a school trip were queuing to see A Tribute To Doris Day. Life in a country town!

 The next day we drove into Mudgee for a look around and found it to be a very smart town which looked to be thriving even in the drought. An excellent sculpture trail ran along the riverside walk, the businesses were all open without a charity shop in sight. We went for a walk around the Putta Bucca Wetlands, an old quarry and sewage treatment works which had been regenerated to become a haven for a huge variety of birds, beautiful. 

A friend had told us we must see Ophir if we were in the area so we set off the next day. Ophir was the site of the first payable gold discovered in Australia and some of the claims operated right up until the 1950s. The road was winding, steep and gravel in some places and had warnings saying 'Not Suitable For Caravans & Campers'. We, of course, decided to take the advice of some random old bloke lurking along the road who assured us it was fine. He turned out to be right as far as our little van was concerned but it would have been a different story with a bigger rig. 

 It was gorgeous, rocky hills surrounded by trees with a river running through and we were astonished to find a flushing toilet and free gas bbqs all beautifully maintained. We were the only people there until some hillbilly types with no teeth turned up. They scarpered when the ranger appeared to take our $10 but it left me feeling a bit vulnerable to be so far away from anyone without a quick escape route. 
We survived the night without being eaten by mountain men and went on the marked out 2km walk the following morning. It was well signposted and took us through a honeycomb of disused mines and caves, I was hoping it would be a birdy and wombatty walk but it turned out to be a bit snakey and insecty but excellent all the same. The hillbilly types had returned just before our walk so we were relieved to find everything still intact when we returned and we packed up and headed to Orange. There had been clouds gathering for a couple of days and the sky had become completely grey. It must be so disappointing to be longing for rain and see these clouds only to have them disappear again and there was certainly no rain forecast for the forseeable future. 
Orange was a big place with glorious federation houses with deep verandas all around with brick pillars.The trend seemed to be for English country gardens, challenging in Australia at the best of times but especially in the drought. Once we had seen the ghastly theatre and paid our respects to the first power pole(?) we walked around  Cook Park which was very beautiful but water was being shipped in to keep it alive. We camped in Macquarie Park State Forest which was a splendid spot but with loads of flies so we were thankful to have our bug tent with us to sit outside in. 
 Overnight it unexpectedly  bucketed down. There was a massive thunderstorm and torrential rain for hours, not enough to break the drought but welcome all the same. We started our journey back and stopped in the beautiful old miming town of Sofala. It is like a real wild west town but everything was closed due to a power cut caused by the storm, life is not easy in some of these places. 
We stopped off at Jerry's Plains again on the way back and our neighbouring campers told has they had been forced to drive there from Forster where a bushfire had started. We did not know at the time but this was the beginning of a terrible season of bushfires for New South Wales and Victoria.