Last year we were unable to spend Christmas with Zoȅ, Shaun and Ted because most of the coast between New South Wales and Victoria was on fire. This year Australia is in the grip of La Nina so we drove through driving rain for the whole journey, all 1100kms of it. 

 Permits were required to get into Victoria this trip because of a recent covid outbreak in Sydney's Northern Beaches and it took about an hour to get through the checkpoint. Once we were back in NSW after Christmas the outbreak got worse and it was taking Victorians up to 9 hours to get home across the border before it was closed again, so we were lucky to get away with just the one hour of queuing. 

  The weather cheered up and Christmas with the Kents was delightful and felt like a return to normal times at last. It was over all to quickly as our permits ran out on Boxing Day and we had to get back into NSW before turning into pumpkins.

The plan was to take a slow trip back in the caravan avoiding large towns where we might encounter the lurgy so we headed for Henty, just over the border for our first stop. There was only one other van in the showground which was a shame because it was a great place to stay, right in the middle of grain country. A railway line ran alongside but only the grain trains and an occasional huge train carrying steel from Melbourne passed by so they did not bother us. Apparently it was a bumper grain crop this year which helped make up for the disastrous drought years leading up to 2020. 

Country towns always find something as their claim to fame and Henty was proud to promote itself as 'The Home of Headlie's Header', a farming invention from 1914 which had a whole museum dedicated to it. The town itself sat in the shadow of huge grain silos and was incredibly clean and tidy, as well as pretty empty. We stayed for a couple of nights and visited nearby Culcairn, again very neat and tidy especially the palm trees along the centre of the high street, and Holbrook, home of the Big Submarine. 

After leaving Henty the gradual journey towards home then took us through Wagga Wagga and Cootamundra (birthplace of Don Bradman) to Murrumburrah-Harden. The twin towns share a fabulous showground and have an astonishing number of churches. The first Light Horse Regiment recruits for World War 1 were signed up here and there was a beautiful memorial featuring a small bronze of Bill the Bastard, a difficult, powerful horse whose rider rode him into the battleground to rescue comrades who had lost their mounts. 

Bill the Bastard carried four men back at a time and has been commemorated, not only with the small bronze statue but with a massive one which for some reason was locked away in a gallery. I could not find out why because everything was shut for the Christmas holidays but managed to press my face up against the door to get a look at it. If you want to know more, Bill has his own website billthebastard.org 

 Boorowa was not far from Harden so we took a trip there. Supposedly home to the Superb Parrot (we didn't see any) Boorowa is an attractive town with beautifully preserved original shopfronts and interiors and some excellent cafes. There was also a weird pub that did not seem to want to serve anyone but we didn't let it spoil the visit. 

After Harden we headed for Canowindra along the Olympic Highway, so called because it was the route for the Olympic torch ahead of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, through Young. It was cherry season so the road was studded with signs for cherries, cherry pies, cherry jam, cherry ice cream - you name it, they make it out of cherries in Young. Canowindra sounded nice because it had an historic town and hosts the annual hot air balloon festival. It actually turned out to be a bit of a let down. The showground was not great, a willy willy (little whirlwind) attacked us as we were putting our awning out, so that was fun, and we were fascinated by a couple who set their caravan up two metres from the wall of the toilet block and sat in their deckchairs facing said toilet block the whole time we were there. 

 The town was historic as promised but also shut. The shops all had signs in the windows saying call if you want us to open and whinging about what a tough year it had been, why not just open then while there were tourists around? There was quite a flashy looking new Museum of the Fishes but on closer inspection the fish fossils it contained all came from Morocco, how odd. We decided to give the pub a miss for dinner as there were several flies stuck to the menu in the window and opted to move on the next day.

Usually I can find something to like about a town but the next place we chose to stop was Geure and it was horrible. The disused racecourse was advertised for camping but it was very creepy and had, wait for it, communal showers!! I think Ian was up for it but I wasn't so we drove straight back out and carried on our way towards Gulgong, where we have stayed before and knew would be good. On the way the road took us through Wellington, the ice capital of NSW. Opposite the correctional centre was the biggest solar farm I have ever seen, it was staggering but I am amazed there are not more solar farms in a country that gets as much sun as we do.

Gulgong was fab as usual and a great place to spend New Year's Eve. The showground is beautiful but the showers were closed using covid as an excuse, a bit cheeky as the price was the same as usual. Last time we were in Gulgong the Holtermann Museum was nearing completion and this visit it was open. It contained the photographs of Gulgong and Hill End commissioned by Holterman in 1872 using the money he made from finding a record breaking gold nugget. Two buildings that feature in the photos were restored as the site for the museum, the photos were fascinating, well worth a visit. 

 

 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.

 I first started writing this blog partly to capture the wide eyed wonder I experienced whenever I encountered something unexpected in this new, foreign country. Now I have lived here for five years this does not really happen much any more, but I was taken by surprise when we stopped off in Akuna Bay during a recent trip to Sydney. 

The bay itself was absolutely beautiful and really convenient for Sydneysiders who want to keep a boat nearby to use at weekends. I had not given much thought to how much demand there might be for boat storage until I saw the Rack & Stack. It was astonishing, a boat house with hundreds of boats stacked in pigeon holes on top of each other that seemed to go on forever. 

Owners have to call in advance to arrange for their boats to be removed from their pigeon holes by a huge forklift truck and plonked in the water ready for them to set off. It all looked very efficient but I can't imagine what it costs to store a boat there.

Next stop was West Head, just to the north of Sydney in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Ian insists I came here when I visited Australia fourteen years ago but I don't remember at all and I'm sure I would because it was spectacular. 

The park overlooks West Head Lighthouse and the beach below in one direction and the open ocean in the other. Pittwater runs along one side where all the houses are accessible only by boat and it all adds up to make West Head Lookout a very special spot and a must for anyone visiting Sydney. There were humpback whales passing by while we were there on their annual migration to calve in the Great Barrier Reef and you will have to take my word for it that the two splashes in the water are indeed whales. We can actually see the whales from where we live too but it is always a treat.

As we got much nearer to home we took a detour to look at Nora Head Lighthouse which is just south of Newcastle and, according to the information board, placed there because the area was the scene of a staggering number of shipwrecks. Ian took the lighthouse tour while I stayed on solid ground and watched more whales going by. They may have been the same ones I saw earlier, I'm not sure how fast they travel. 

We are determined to set off on another trip shortly but have been busy popping to Melbourne and back since the arrival of the gorgeous grandson three months ago. I have also been busy becoming a proper Australian and attended my 
citizenship ceremony last week. This actually feels like more of an achievement than I expected but tinged with a bit of sadness too as it comes at the same time as our status as 
Europeans looks like being lost to myself and my fellow Brits.

 

 I am sitting at home in front of the fire as a big storm lashes all around us. It is hard to believe that only two weeks ago it was warm and sunny and we were setting off on a little adventure to try out our new car towing the caravan. 

We do not have a new car out of choice, but because one of us (not me) had a slip up with the old one resulting in it being written off. Nobody was hurt, in fact nobody was in it, but it was a write off all the same.

 So we decided to go to Bingara, about 5 hours north and inland from home and, after the usual stop off at Macca's for breakfast we set off along The Fossikers' Way towards Tamworth. We didn't want to drive for too long and there was no need so we stopped overnight at the First Fleet Memorial Park in Wallabadah. 

This is a very popular spot for travellers with hot showers and decent toilets for only a $10 donation. It can actually end up being quite pricey to stay in free or cheap camps because it is the done thing to support the local pub or cafe. By the time a meal and a couple of wines and beers have been sunk, it ends up being way more expensive than a caravan park, mind you, we could always just have a coffee instead.

Bingara was only a couple of hours further on, the road took us through incredibly dry countryside with cows grazing by the roadside on the last available bits of grass. There were some beautiful painted silos on the route featuring a chap who looked remarkably similar to Prince Harry. We came through this area at the same time last year, at that point they had not seen rain since November 2017 and they have had very little since. The drought has really hit hard and shows no sign of letting up, I keep checking the radar to see how far inland the storm we are having today is reaching but unfortunately it is going nowhere near the drought affected towns. 

The tourist information office in town advertised free riverside camping which was as special as they promised. Beautiful riverbanks beside the Gwydir River which comes from quite high up so was still flowing nicely unlike some other rivers around. 

It was gorgeous, only a handful of other caravans there, horses roaming around freely (much to Monty's delight or disgust - hard to tell which) and much warmer than we were expecting in early winter. 

There were no facilities but we are set up for free camping so perfect for us. The only downside was that 6 o'clock was midge o'clock with millions of the little stinkers launching their attack on any campers foolish enough to have a light on, so we finally put up our bug tent that has covered thousands of kilometres with us just waiting for such an event!

 The town was very attractive with striking art deco buildings but sadly, most businesses seemed to be up for sale. While we were having a coffee we spotted a sign for the Bingara Show  which was coming up on the Saturday, our wedding anniversary. Now I love a country show and this one had a rodeo in the evening which was a first for both of us and it was only a short walk from our camp. 

Well, the day of the show came round and it was brilliant. It was the usual mix of small children handling huge show bulls, hundreds of chickens, sheep and cows competing for honours. Flower, vegetable and handicraft competitions, best fleece and of course, prizes for the best baking - my personal favourite categories being Beautiful Biscuits and Man's Cake! 

There were sheepdog trials, stockman championships and the dressage and showjumping kept us entertained for hours.

 After all that excitement, there was still the rodeo to come. Doak Bucking Bulls were a travelling rodeo who brought everything along so we lined up around the perimeter to the strains of Achey Breaky Heart etc and were looking forward to seeing brave men who did this for a living perform for our entertainment. The announcer came out and said, 'We will begin this competiotion with our newest riders THE 8 YEAR OLDS!' We couldn't believe it, parents allowing their 8 year olds on bucking bulls, they were only small bulls but mean little devils just the same. 

By the time we got onto the full sized riders and enormous, angry bulls we had developed huge respect for the Protection Clowns, the men who draw the bull away from the fallen rider, one got a hoof right in his face but just rubbed his jaw a bit and carried on! We walked back after the show trying to decide whether we were appalled or thrilled by the spectacle but in agreement it was the best wedding anniversary ever.
Bingara had been unable to afford to stage the annual show this year because of the hardship suffered by the residents at the hands of the drought so a mental health charity stepped in to foot the bill, and gave everyone a thoroughly good day out to take their minds off their troubles, well done them.