It’s been raining all day here on the “Sunshine Coast” - a good time to do some catching up. So, to continue with our travels through inland NSW - left Coonabarabran on June 25th and drove through pleasant countryside to Tamworth, which was a bit of a surprise really. It was a much bigger place than we expected, I think the population is over 50,000, but it had a nice country town feel about it, as well as being the home of country music in Australia. We visited the “Walk a Country Mile” exhibition at the Information Centre which was really [View Full Entry]

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Here's one for the petrol-heads among you, so if you are not into motor racing then log off now! Must say I am not a great fan but I did enjoy checking out Mt Panorama. Surprisingly, the track is a public road with private homes, restaurants, even a vineyard! So it is open 24/7, but with a speed restriction of 60kph, and this is enforced quite frequently by the NSW police! We were told by the very helpful and friendly staff at the Motor Racing museum at Mt Pam that the cops often catch people doing excessive speeds and also there [View Full Entry]

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June 18 - left our lovely Sydney caravan park and drove up to Lithgow, which is at the western end of the Blue Mountains - we chose this route as we had been to Katoomba (the most popular area of the Blue Mountains) before. The drive to Lithgow was rather a challenge - we took the road out from Windsor with the interesting name of Bells Line of Road - a great scenic drive but very hilly! There were a couple of very long steep sections where Blu had to get down to first gear and pray that Big Bird would [View Full Entry]

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May 26 - a warm sunny 25 degree day - we were on the road by 8, a big drive ahead of us - Wilpena Pound to Broken Hill, 450+ kms. Stopped at Peterborough to visit Steamworld. Prior to standard gauge rail, there were different size rail tracks in each state of Australia, and Peterborough, being central to 3 states, has a turntable with 3 different size gauges (fascinating stuff for train buffs!). We got a personal guided tour from Peter, one of the volunteers there - they have lots of old engines and railway carriages, including one which the Child [View Full Entry]

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22 May - after completing the Oodnadatta Track, we were back on the bitumen again - but not for long! After a night at Copley, where we washed a large load of dusty clothes and cleaned up the worst of the Oodna dust from the caravan, we headed onto another gravel road (about 130km) to Arkaroola in the northern Flinders Ranges. Arkaroola is an awe-inspiring place, it was an outback station until Reg and Griselda Sprigg purchased it in 1968 and turned it into a wilderness sanctuary. Reg was a world-renowned geologist and a leader in mineral exploration and oceanographic research [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 18 May - we head out of Coober Pedy for the first real taste of Australian outback since the Nullarbor. Heading down the gravel road towards the Painted Desert, we encounter the South Australian police coming the other way at 100kph - and bingo, a broken windscreen from a loose stone - thanks! First stop the Painted Desert, which was spectacular, even though the corrugations on the road through shook the you-know-what out of our caravan - shower door came off, front of the air con unit fell off, pantry shelf broken and a few cupboards loose! Some repairs to [View Full Entry]

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No these are not the names of our new friends, just new places we visited on the next leg of our journey around Oz! We have developed a special interest in the Murray River, not sure quite why but it is an Australian icon really - it flows from the Snowy mountains to the coast of South Australia and impacts on such a lot of Australian lives, past and present. Anyway, from Adelaide we headed out to Mannum (May 7th) and stopped a couple of nights in the caravan park right next to the river. Mannum is the main houseboat centre [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 27 April - arrived in Adelaide and felt right at home - such a nice graceful city, with the feel of a large country town rather than a capital city. You can drive into the city in 20 minutes and find a park 5 minutes walk from the centre of the city! Not many capital cities left in the world where you can still do this! We also felt some emotional attachment to Adelaide, as most of Blu’s ancestors came from here including his mother Joyce. We spent 10 days here - several days spent doing family history stuff - [View Full Entry]

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Well it’s been a while since our last blog! We finally left Melbourne (for the third and final time) on 22 April, a beautiful sunny day, and drove to Ballarat, where we visited the Eureka Centre. Decided to skip the premier Ballarat tourist attraction, Sovereign Hill, as it is very expensive. The Eureka Centre was a really great (and well priced!) exhibition of the famous Eureka stockade (a miner’s uprising against the authorities, which ended up in bloodshed). While we were there, a group of high school students were doing a re-enactment of the court case, very amusing to watch their [View Full Entry]

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Well summer is over, the weather is noticeably cooler, and we have lost our long evenings with the end of daylight saving. On the other hand, the leaves are all turning yellow and red, the grass is finally becoming green again, and autumn is a nice time of year to be in this part of Australia. Back in Melbourne, we got the Landcruiser damage assessed - rather surprised to find it would take over a week to repair!- so we decided to make the most of our extra time in Melbourne, and the rental car provided as part of our insurance. [View Full Entry]

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