I’m a lucky person. I love travelling and I love being home. I have the best of both worlds.
Where I’m going: Christmas Shopping.
I only have Mum and Dad yet to buy for.
Georgia is turning 30 a few days after Christmas, and I want to take her shopping for some women’s shoes to fit her. It’s time.
Where I’ve been:to the mechanic.
I’m still salty about the bingle I had, just 4 days after coming back from the Crazy Road Trip. I was happily driving along Nepean Highway, went into the service road to turn left and saw that there were no cars in front of the car before me, so OF COURSE they’d be turning.
I glanced to the right to check if there’d be any cars on the road when I got there, looked back and the silly cow in front of me hadn’t gone… even though there was nothing in front of her. So I ran into her.
It was my fault by the letter of the law, but why wouldn’t you make the turn if there was nothing preventing you from doing so? My poor little car. She drove 8,000 km with no problems, and then this happens.
I will have to leave her at the mechanics for 7 business days at the end of January. They’ll be stripping her right back and replacing lots of panels etc. Thank god for car insurance!
What I’m reading:LOTS of books.
I’m thinking I’ll do a whole post on this, as I read about 12 books on my holiday. There were some cracking good reads among them.
What I’m watching:Alaskan Bush People.
This is a show on Netflix. I didn’t feel like watching anything challenging and this show fits the bill. It’s about a family of 7 kids who are totally under the thumb of their incompetent parents, particularly the father. They live far away from civilisation and exist like settlers in the 1700’s.
Their father is so STUPID. His decisions are questionable most of the time and he thinks he’s the head of “the wolf pack.” Ugh.
I got excited though, when I saw two towns that we went to in Alaska. Ketchikan and Hoonah. They filmed a segment in the very café I went to in Hoonah, where I saw the bald eagle fly to the pier and eat a salmon it had clutched in its claws.
What I’m listening to:Georgia’s music.
It’s drifting down from her room at the end of the house to where Scout and I are in the lounge room.
What I’m eating:Low carb stuff.
*sigh*
What I’m planning:my Vietnamese visa.
I have to get things together. I’ve heard they can be tricky to get right and I know quite a few people who have had to get one at the airport – at a cost of $500 or so. Yikes!
Who deserves a ‘thumbs-up’:Everyone who has commented on the blog this year.
Anyone who has been blogging as long as I have would know that people used to comment a lot more on blogs back in the day. Nowadays it seems that people just consume the posts and move right along.
I appreciate every comment and they make my day. So thanks, commenters!
What has made me smile:Avocadoes!
I planted a couple of avocado trees 3 years ago. I was watering the front yard a couple of days ago when I noticed something.
Yes, one of the trees is finally sprouting avocadoes. I was so thrilled!
Surprisingly, I didn’t wake up too stiff and sore from my mountaineering adventure the day before, but I decided to forego any more arduous activities on my last day here. I read my 11th or 12th book on the holiday, and then I took a gentle walk beside the creek in the afternoon.
On the map, it’s called the Thredbo River, but it was just creek-sized here.
It was nice, though the flies were a little annoying. I walked all the way to the Bushman’s Hut, which sounded a lot more interesting than it ended up being.
The sound of the water was lovely. I also heard kookaburras from the bushland on the other side of the creek.
I bumped into these characters on the way back.
“Be careful – there’s a snake to the right,” their owner said. “That’s why these two are on leads,”
I kept an eye out but didn’t see a thing.
This was a nice little “goodbye” from the Snowy Mountains.
The next day I was on the road by 8:30. I had a 7.5-hour drive ahead of me, but I was stopping in Lakes Entrance for lunch with my cousin Lynette. Apart from her Mum’s funeral, I haven’t seen her for years, so I was looking forward to the catch-up.
The country on the NSW side of the border was cattle grazing country.
Farms, farms everywhere.
Then woo hoo! Victoria! My nose was firmly pointed towards home now.
The drive between the border and Lakes Entrance was beautiful, but the closer I got towards home, the less inclined I was to stop the car for photos.
I spent a couple of hours wth my cousin and we didn’t stop talking the whole time. She grows fruit and veggies, like me, and she also travels!! When I told her about the Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar trip, she said, “I’ve done that!”
It was so interesting to hear about what I was going to see, particularly in Zanzibar.
When I got home, Scout MOANED at me for ages. Her tail was wagging, but she was letting me know the anguish she’d suffered in giving me up for dead. After a while, I looked over her head to Georgia and said, “I’m going away again in February…”
I gave her a squeaky toy I’d bought in Barkly Homestead. It lasted 5 minutes before she started pulling the stuffing out.
Screenshot
Here is the final map of the trip. My trusty Golf and I travelled 8,000 km and I had a fantastic time. The Golf didn’t miss a beat and I saw so much. I’ve definitely pencilled in the Nullabor Plain for a future adventure.
On Saturday I spent time with Tom31 and Sophie, and then on Sunday I saw these two for lunch. David31 and Izzy are living in a caravan, preparing to build their first house – can you believe that were married over 18 months ago? Time flies.
On Monday, I got the Yellow Fever vaccination for my Africa trip in April.
And then four days after I got back, this happened:
Windblown, sunburned and happy. This is me at the top of Australia’s tallest mountain.
But this was one of the toughest things that I’ve ever done. Climbing Mt Kosciuszko is not a job for the faint-hearted. Or chubby and unfit.
You start by going up a chairlift. Awesome! Go up a chairlift and then you’re there!
I wish.
There’s a ‘gentle’ walk from the top of the chairlift to the summit. They have provided a path that makes this walk idiot-proof. There’s no way you could miss the way unless you were actively trying to get lost.
It all sounds great, doesn’t it?
A walk of around 7 km – going UP. Then there’s another walk of 7 km – going DOWN. That’s a lot of km. The ones going up are brutal. I’m not kidding.
Add the wind which was blowing at such a hard rate that I had to take my sunhat and stuff it under my jacket. I never would have been able to keep it on.
Incidentally, look at all the water here. Remember the country I’ve been driving through that was so parched? Water is here in every direction.
It was a stark landscape, just rocks and grasses.
I was trying to put as much distance as I could between myself and a school group from Firbank Secondary College that had around 50 screaming teenage girls in it. I knew it’d take them a while to get them all up the chairlift, so I set off briskly (at first) so that I could hear just the wind and the birds.
And here’s where I have to apologise to the US, Canadian and European readers. I know I’ve posted shots of snow in these countries during their summers and laughed at them. Well – it was December 4 – summer. And here are snow patches in Australia.
These were the only ones and they were way up high…
But still. I apologise for saying that snow in summer is ridiculous.
This sign made me sad. I’d been walking for around 2 hours at this point. SURELY the summit was around the next corner?
Actually, when I said I’d been “walking” for 2 hours, that’s polishing a turd. I was walking a little way… stopping to get my breath back… walking a little more… stopping to say, “Fuck me!” and breathing hard and contemplating turning back… then I’d walk a little more and repeat. I was not enjoying myself.
It was AWFUL.
HORRIBLE.
There were two reasons why I didn’t give up and turn back.
I told the kids I was doing it.
I know how stubborn I am. If I turned back, I know that I’d drive up here and try again at some stage. Since I was here now, I may as well save the time and energy and keep going.
I gritted my teeth and kept walking. It was somewhere at this stage that I realised I could hear my waterproof jacket “Swish-swishing” as I walked. Remember Ming in Antarctica who never took off her Gortex jacket?
I laughed to myself and after a while I stopped hearing it.
People were starting to come down the path from the top.
Nearly there now!” they’d say cheerily.
But I kept turning corner after corner and it was obvious that they were toying with me.
The clouds were starting to get thicker, too.
Then there it was.
Holy hell – I did it!
It’s funny. Climbing Mt Kosciuszko has never been on my bucket list.
But I felt terrific, even with a sunhat stuffed under my jacket.
If I didn’t do this, I would have always felt it was a missed opportunity, seeing as I was staying in the neighbourhood. A bit like how I felt about going on the solo part of this Crazy Road Trip 2 weeks ago, or doing the Rim Walk in Kings’s Canyon a couple of months ago.
Incidentally – both walks are hard. But this one was way harder than the Rim Walk. I think it was because with the Rim Walk you know going in that once you get past the first 500 steps of absolute hell, then the rest of the walk is fine.
With Mt Kosciuszko, the steep incline keeps going on and on with very little respite. It’s prolonged agony instead of a short, sharp agony and then it’s over.
Fortunate Frogdancer strikes again. I was at the summit for 10 minutes, enjoying the clear views, then just as that loud school group showed up – yes, I beat them there! – the cloud began to roll in.
But the side where Perisher was? All clear.
I sat down, ate a nut bar and drank from my Antarctica Pee Bottle, enjoying the view and the sense of satisfaction. I had no idea which direction Melbourne was, or I would’ve waved to the kids.
After a while I got sick of the chatter from the school group, so I began to make my way down.
Every now and then, I’d been sending texts to Tom32’s fiancee Sophie. She grew up on the slopes of Mt Buller and I knew she’d like the views from here. She’s a mountain girl.
I told her that I HATED the walk on the way up, but I was looking forward to the views coming down.
I’m not kidding you – this rolled in just when I was around the other side of the summit. Have you ever seen anything like it?
I was uncomfortably reminded of the Stephen King story ‘The Mist.’ If hungry creatures were hiding here, there was absolutely nowhere to hide.
I decided to pick up the pace a bit, just in case.
Luckily, the clouds held off and I could still enjoy the vistas on the way down.
I took this shot because I was struck with the bright colours of the coats against the grass.
When they came up next to me on the path, the little kids were running. I gaped at their Mum and said, “They’re running???”
She laughed and said, “Yep. They’ll be exhausted tonight though!”
I wish I could show you shots of the huge views sweeping down from the path, but you know how cameras don’t pick up how vast landscapes can be.
It was a walk full of the spectacular. I wasn’t wrong when I said I’d enjoy the walk coming down far more than I did the walk coming up.
Water again. I liked the symmetry of this.
This nearly killed me. It’s pretty much the only part of the way down where the path looks like it did all the way up. See where it angles up the hill? I swear I had to pause 4 times up that bit to catch my breath.
However, much further along the way back, I saw something which made me feel like I’m doing the right thing with all this travel I’ve planned.
It was around 20 minutes from the end of the trek. I was idly watching a middle-aged couple coming up the mountain in front of me, when they stopped, gave each other a kiss and then the wife turned and began heading down the path towards the chairlift.
It was obvious that she’d realised that this walk was far harder than she knew (and I could definitely relate to that!) and she’d given up.
I don’t want to have to be the one who gives up. I want to see it all.
I walked behind her for a while before I overtook her. She wasn’t that much bigger than I am. I was surprised. She probably could have done it.
My last shot before I reached the chairlift!
All up, it took me 4.5 hours to get here and back, not counting the time I spent at the summit. They say that it takes between 3 – 6 hours for people to do it, so I was happy with my time, particularly as I’m unfit.
But it nearly killed me. I was DEPLETED by the time I hit the ground. My face was sunburned, especially my poor nose, and I had nothing left in the tank.
I texted Sophie and told her I was back down on the ground, then said, “It wouldn’t have killed them to make that chairlift end further up the mountain!!!”
It took everything I had to get to the car, go home, get up the stairs and fall on the bed to take a 2 hour nap. I was DONE.
I’m very glad I walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko, but this is one of those things that I only have to do ONCE.
I have a week at the resort, so I thought I’d spend 3 days lazing around, 3 days racing around to see the mountains and then I’d go home. So naturally, I woke up to pouring rain on the first day of my intended racing around.
But you know? I didn’t care. Retirement has given me the gift of time. I still had more days where I could go and climb Mt Kosciuszko, which I have definitely decided to do. I can’t be in the neighbourhood and not do it!
So I spent the morning reading another book – I’ve run out of the actual books that I brought with me and I’m so glad that I loaded up my iPad with 10 more library books when I last had wifi. This holiday would NOT be a happy one if I didn’t have enough books to read. This resort may be lovely but it lacks wifi.
At around 2 PM I looked out of the window and the rain had stopped. I studied a helpful little booklet about the local area and noticed that there was a gin distillery about a 10-minute drive away. Remember the wonderful distillery that I visited on Kangaroo Island?
I jumped in the car and went to visit the Wild Brumby Distillery. Just the thing for a rainy day!
This turned out to be a lovely place, where someone had decided to put sculptures everywhere – just like me! It’s a gorgeous place, set like a jewel in the hills.
Most of the sculptures are huge. I’m not going to show you all of them, because you might want to visit one day and I don’t want to spoil it for you.
The tasting/gift shop was warm and welcoming. Being a Tuesday, I was the only one there. This is a Christmas tree full of schnapps – which turned out to be what the owners made their name from.
On Google Maps, it was referred to as a schnapps place, so I wasn’t surprised when I asked my hostess what they specialised in and she replied “Schnapps.”
I enjoyed their gin – they even make a ‘navy strength’ one at 50% proof (or so).
What can. say? I came for the gin but left with the schnapps. The butterscotch one was amazing, and I also liked the sour apple with lemon. It’s made from Granny Smith apples – my favourite.
This is the backside of a beautiful little foxie called Cosi. I was walking around the lawns, looking at the artworks, when she came barrelling over to me for a pat. She sat at my feet and wouldn’t leave, even when her owner called her name twice. He had to whistle before she ran back to him.
I miss Scout so much. It’s probably because I’m nearly home and I know I’ll be seeing her in a few days. I can’t wait to cuddle that long little body again.
Imagine having the space to have life-sized pieces like this?
I can’t resist a well-laid-out veggie garden. This one was all berries. I’m assuming juniper for the gin.
I preferred this one from the back angle.
I thought I’d take this shot of a typical country road leading out to the highway. Everyone puts their mailboxes here to make life easy for the postie.
And if Liga’s reading this, then yes. Aussies call their postman a ‘postie.’
Such beautiful, serene countryside. I can understand why people might like to live here.
Not me, though. I’m too leery of bushfires.
But look at these happy cows. They’re surrounded by food and water, so different to the cattle that I saw just a few days ago in the Outback.
This brought home to me just how vast this country is.
On this trip I’ve seen so many differing climates. So many places where people, cattle and crows survive. We are lucky to live in a time where anyone can simply hop in a car and go and explore them all.
If I hadn’t had this booking here at Lake Crackenback, I probably would have wandered around more and seen more of the country in detail. But I’m glad that it has ended up the way it has.
I’ve been able to recharge the batteries before heading home to Life As Usual.
And I’ve looked at the weather forecast. Tomorrow is the day when I’ll stand on the highest point in Australia!
I was planning to take myself out to the restaurant here on the night I arrived, but once I’d unpacked the car in the rain and sat on the couch with a glass of wine, I wasn’t going to set foot outside again. I was at one with the couch.
So this shot is from lunch the next day. It was still pouring rain, so I grabbed a book I’d been saving for this moment and took myself out to the restaurant to celebrate having completed the Crazy Road Trip part of this holiday.
Now that I’ve done it – time to come clean.
Parts of me were nervous about doing this trip.
The first part, where I took the Ligas from my place to Adelaide, was no sweat. I’d done it before, after all. I was taking them to well-established places with major tourist attractions and I knew that the roads would be fine and there’d be no troubles with anything.
My kids, my family and friends were leery about the next part of the trip. The one where we head off into the Outback. We’ve all heard the warnings about travelling out there. I even had one friend, who shall remain nameless, call me and beg me not to do it after she read my itinerary on one of the blogs.
“You’ll kill yourself!!!” she said. Not really the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re days away from making a big trip. I crossed my fingers and vowed to prove her wrong.
Carry plenty of water. (The only time we used the extra water in the whole trip was to fill Liga’s water bottle before she went on her solo hike in the Grampians.)
Fill up at every petrol station you come across, in case the next one has run out of fuel and you’re stuck. (I did this because I had no intention of ruining the Ligas’ experience in Australia. I noticed some browsers with ’empty’ signs on them, but we always had enough premium petrol for my trusty little Golf.)
Take cash with you, in case you need to pay for something at a remote place with no internet. (Again, I made sure I had plenty of cash because I didn’t want to ruin the Ligas’ adventure. The only time I had to use it was when I was at Barkly Homestead, right in the middle of the Outback, when I handed over a $5 note to get coins for the washing machine.)
Lock your doors in (various places) because the crime rate is high. (This was a tough one. It was hard to convey to the girls that they had to be careful in some places without sounding like a paranoid Karen. The fact remains that some of the places we visited have high petty crime rates and I wanted to keep them safe. They went home without anything bad happening, so that was a win.)
You should only drive in the Outback with a large 4WD car. (When I was here in September, I kept an eye on the roads. Sure, most cars were big, but there were some smaller cars like mine. I figured, with a bit of luck, I’d be ok. I trust in the German workmanship of the Golf.)
Kangaroos, camels and cattle can run onto the road and wreck your car. (THIS was the one I was most afraid of. If a large animal appeared out of nowhere and there was no way to avoid hitting it, then yes. The holiday would be ruined. My beautiful little car would be ruined. And I (and the Ligas, maybe) might be ruined.This was one I had no control of and I decided to go with the odds.)
Overseas tourists can forget to drive on the left and can hit you.(This actually happened to a woman on the Simple Savings forum. She lived in the Northern Territory and a car driven by a French tourist ploughed into her. She was trapped and if it wasn’t for a truck driver who happened to come along and saw that her car was alight and pulled her out, she’d be dead. Her feet were mangled in the crash, so she has life-long consequences from that. She wrote a post warning me to think carefully about doing this trip. This shook me for a while,until I realised that the chances of something like this happening to TWO members of a small online forum were probably pretty minuscule. Still, I kept an eye on every single car or truck on the other side of the road, just in case.)
Take a first-aid kit with you. You may be a first responder in a place with no internet.(Thank goodness this didn’t happen. I bought a kit, but I forgot to put it in the car.)
So before I dived into my book, I ordered a glass of bubbly and raised it to myself. Sometimes we have to do things that scare us to grow.
I allowed myself to feel a little bit proud of myself.
I honestly don’t think the Ligas could have had a better holiday with me, apart from the weather on a few days, but that was out of my control. They saw so much, particularly the wildlife. As my sister Kate said a few days ago, not too many tourists come away from Australia having done a full-on road trip into the outback. They have seen a huge swathe of this country.
I’m also proud that, despite my qualms, I swung the wheel and turned left instead of right. I’ve booked so many tours for 2025, so it’s good to be reminded that I AM a capable traveller on my own.
Keep in mind that I still have a 6-hour drive to get back home again. So far, though, I’ve driven around 7,400 km.
It’s hard to process what that means until you see it on a map. It’s crazy.
But now I’m here on the LAZY part of the road trip.
Back in 2007, when I was just clawing my way out of poverty, dragging the kids with me, I bought into a timeshare. I wanted to guarantee that the boys and I would have at least one holiday a year.
This timeshare wasn’t tied to a single property, but instead uses points, which you can use on properties around Australia, New Zealand, Bali and other places around the world with partners of the timeshare. I used this partner feature when I took the kids to Phuket and when I went to Kangaroo Island this year.
Lake Crackenback, right from the start, has always been fully booked. People absolutely love it and as soon as time becomes available, it’s taken. It’s great for the snow season, but it has the lake and bushwalks etc in the warmer months as well.
Imagine my surprise when I logged on a few months ago, just to idly look for something that might be available in Nov/Dec, when I saw a week available right at this time. I grabbed it.
This created an endpoint after I decided to do the long, solo road trip. Instead of coming home for a few days, I’d arrive straight at the resort. Poor Scout. But from what Georgia says, she’s adjusting to life as a single dog. I can’t wait for her welcome when I get home, though!
There are a lot of people who own homes here, but these apartments over the water appear to be for people like me.
Poor people, in other words. Haha!
Look at these ducks. You know how most ducks glide across the water? These ones jerk their necks as they swim, making it obvious that they’re making an effort underneath the water. They also duck dive a lot. I like that.
I decided to keep the first 3 days as R & R days. During that time, I napped twice a day, read 4 books and learned that if I walked briskly around the lake 3 times, I could close all the rings on my Apple watch. That’s what I’ll be doing once I finish this post. I need to be a bit fitter than I am at present.
I was delighted to find that the path around the lake has sculptures along it. I was trying to work out what this one was all about until I read what it was called.
“The Bird Watchers.”
Here’s the bird.
The bird watchers were pointing their binoculars everywhere except where the bird actually was.
This was a hefty one, but when I was on my third round of the lake, it was swinging in the wind.
I liked this one. She could also move, but it must take a VERY strong wind to swing her around.
People can hire bikes, and use canoes and kayaks on the lake – there’s a gym, spa, pool and sauna.
I was so pleased to see this little fella. We don’t get rosellas where I live.
We have Little Ravens though. This one is very used to being fed by the people in these apartments. He isn’t afraid to get very close, particularly when people are feeding ducks and he swoops in for a share.
I love all the different shades on his feathers. His eyes also reminded me of the Bald eagles that I saw in Canada and Alaska.
I felt bad when I walked around a corner and the ducks all scuttled straight into the water. They looked as if they were getting warm, sunning themselves on the path.
If I was in England, I would’ve thought this was meant to be a mole. Maybe it’s a platypus?
Finally, do you remember the bear scat I saw on the path when I was walking on my own in Canada?
Here’s some kangaroo scat. Not nearly as fearsome, I know, but I liked how it flew my mind back to a place so far away. How incredibly lucky am I to have visited both places within 5 months of each other?
Here’s how I’m choosing to eat a meal a day. A fellow forum member from Simple Savings who does a lot of caravanning with her husband put me onto this. A toasty maker. I love a baked bean toasty. Or a cheese and ham one.
A week before I left on this trip, I saw a handy hint to help with cleaning it – to use baking paper. OMG. Game changer!
Well HOLY SHIT!!!!!
I went for that walk.
I was walking around the lake, minding my own business, when I LITERALLY almost stepped on a Red Bellied Black Snake.
My foot was millimetres from landing on it when it suddenly started moving.
I desperately tried my best to hover in mid-air while it wended its way of the way of my feet.
Honestly, it scared the living daylights out of me.
Locals said, “Yeah, it’ll kill you, but they’re very non-aggressive. “
Seems typical though. I do my best to avoid being out of doors, then when I do, it tries to kill me!!
However, I was thwarted. I found the Lookout, which gives a nice view of the city, but the track was one that you had to pick out for yourself, by the looks of things. I was there on my own, so if I injured myself I’d be toast.
The only people nearby were 3 dodgy-looking people in a car near where I parked mine, which also made me nervous. I decided, after walking a little way down the track, to stop when it became steep and tricky to descend. I didn’t want to screw up the Crazy Road Trip now, when I was so close to getting to the final destination before I headed home.
So I walked back to the car, disappointed. Still, maybe one day I’ll come back and try again, this time with a better map.
I found another silo. It seems that the rural communities have absolutely embraced the trend of decorating silos. Everywhere you turn around, there’s one.
Anyway, time to hit the road. This was another driving day to get to the resort at Lake Crackenback – which is probably how my back will feel after 16 days behind the wheel!
Sometimes I stopped to take pictures when I saw something pretty and it was safe to park the car.
I love this one. I stopped, got out and walked back to take this.
I love the one white face staring back at me from the mob. She was intent on monitoring what I was doing. They other cows couldn’t care less.
Google Maps sent me down more back roads.
One shot I didn’t stop for was one of a bull, alone in his paddock. He had the biggest set of testicles I’ve ever seen, but since this is a family-friendly space, I decided to keep driving.
Hay bales were dotted everywhere. Aren’t they pretty, close-up?
So many grasses.
In the afternoon I began to see the mountains I was heading for.
There were also some ominous clouds forming.
As I was driving along, I got stuck behind a ute. This turned out to be fortunate, as out of nowhere a kangaroo bounded out of nowhere onto the road, saw the ute and backtracked as quickly as it arrived, while the ute was braking and weaving.
It was certainly exciting to see, but I’m glad that someone else, presumably more experienced than me, was the one actually avoiding it.
I had lunch in my car, but by Tumbarumba (what a great name!) I needed a pit stop.
This tree was near the public restrooms. I walked over for a closer look.
People leave gnomes here.
From all over the world.
You can see through the smears of dead bugs on the windscreen what the countryside looks like here, in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains.
Apologies for the thumb in the corner. I was so excited that I didn’t realise it was there.
I was driving along, minding my own business when I saw this sign… with the last three names on it.
Have any of you read ‘The Silver Brumby’ books by Elyne Mitchell when you were kids?
It’s a funny thing when reality comes crashing into your imaginative world. I read all of the Silver Brumby books when I was young, even the last few which were all a bit too airy-fairy. The first 4 or 5 were cracking good reads, though!
These names were mentioned all the time, especially the Cascades, where the brumbies used to go in Spring when the grass was plentiful after winter.
I mean, I knew that the books were set up here in the Snowy Mountains. But in my mind, they were still in fiction-land. It gave me such a thrill to see those names.
I stopped the car, as you can see, and walked back to take a photo. To the left of me was a young woman, leaning on a gate. We said hi to each other, then I explained that I was taking a photo of the sign because of the books I’d read when I was a kid.
She laughed, “Looks like it’s turned into a good day for you, then!”
She wasn’t wrong.
There have been bushfires here. It will take a little time for the trees to regenerate, but as long as another fire doesn’t come through here too soon, the bush will go back to normal.
I stopped to take a photo of the sign, but then thought I’d show you what this place sounds like. It was going to rain very shortly, but the cicadas were out in force.
You can even see the smears from the bugs who lost their lives on my windscreen. They were shortly to be washed away by the rain, saving me the trouble of doing it.
See the sign? Also part of the novels.
I was thrilled.
The Pilot!
Thowra climbs up there a few times. It’s the peak sticking up behind the other hill.
Look at this photo! The eerie blurriness of those hills is EXACTLY what it looked like. I was standing there at the Cascades, longing to go for a quick walk and really see it, but the rain was coming.
Time to jump into my trusty Golf and race to the resort.
I drove through a tremendous downpour, which is always fun when you’re driving along the sides of a mountain. I got here unscathed, collected my room key from Reception and walked into my apartment, where I’ll be for the next week.
Look at my balcony. It’s directly over the lake. It reminded me of my Alaskan cruise with our balcony, but with this one the water is close.
So are the ducks. This is going to be a lovely place to rest, recuperate and then explore. After all, the tallest mountain in Australia is here!
This certainly wasn’t a sign I was expecting to see – but good on them for owning it, I suppose!
(For my overseas readers, a ‘bogan’ is like a redneck or a chav.)
I left for Griffith at around 9 AM, after a leisurely breakfast at the local bakery. I selected Griffith as the last night of the Crazy Road Trip because it was dead centre between Bourke and Lake Crackenback, where I was heading for a week’s R & R.
This was a driving day.
It really was.
For some reason, my Google Maps kept sending me off the main highways and onto what I suppose were “shortcuts,” which meant that I was driving on very narrow roads. But I also saw some lovely scenery.
Loads of wildlife, too. I saw all these creatures without a single Liga being in the car!
I also saw a couple of crosses and bunches of flowers, which are never signs of good news when you see them by the side of the road.
On the bright side, I also saw a bright orange parrot, which flashed across the road above me and vanished into the trees to the left. It made me happy. It was so beautiful against the blue sky.
After stopping at a small town for lunch, I turned left when I saw a sign for a lookout.
The view was pretty. You can see that the red roads are still around, even as I drive towards the bottom of the state. I was a little weirded out when two cars suddenly appeared at the top of the lookout. It looked like one was chasing the other. I started to drive down the hill, but pulled over (and locked my doors) to let them go past me.
They were gone within seconds. I have no idea what was going on, but I turned left when I got down to the highway again and kept going on my way to Griffith.
I’d downloaded ‘Ingenue’ and ‘Hymns of the 49th Parallel’ by k d lang, so I was having a singing afternoon.
This was the first day of the road trip when the driving started to pall.
I think it was because, for the first time since I’d left Adelaide, vegetation was crowding the sides of the roads, and there weren’t the magnificent clear views of the horizons that I’d become used to.
By this time, I’d had to slow down for wild life that was wandering all over the roads. The annoying thing about Australian wildlife is how wonderfully camouflaged it is. The very SECOND an animal or reptile gets off the road, it blends so seamlessly into the foliage that there’s no chance to take a photo, no matter how hard you try.
This goat was the only animal I braked for that actually hung around long enough for me to snap his photo. (I’m calling it a ‘him” because of the beard, but it could be a female. People make the same mistake with Scout all the time.)
It was incredibly exciting when an emu ran across the road in front of me. It was huge! It was suddenly there in front of me, running from right to left. It was only later that I realised that if I’d been travelling a few seconds faster, then it wouldn’t have been so wonderful.
Thankfully, my trusty Golf was unharmed.
The good thing about being directed down all the side roads was that there wasn’t as much traffic, so there was more chance to see animals. The best one, after the emu, was a massive lizard basking in the middle of the road as I came over a hill and started barrelling towards it.
He didn’t seem at all grateful to me for slowing down enough to let him get to the side of the road and disappear. He threw me what looked like a filthy look as he stalked away.
By late afternoon I was driving into Griffith, a dull town that exists to grow citrus, wine and, reportedly, marijuana, thanks to the irrigation pumped into it.
It’s very different from the parched Australia that I’ve been driving through!
I grabbed a motel room two doors away from an Aldi, where I went and bought supplies for my week in the timeshare resort at Lake Crackenback. I might be staying in a luxurious resort, but I’m not paying for expensive groceries that I can bring with me!
That night, I received a WhatsApp from Liga. They were home.
“Back to reality!” I quipped. The next morning I woke up to this photo:
Bloody hell! No wonder she loved tropical Cairns so much!
When people say, “It’s beyond the black stump” they mean that it’s way out beyond the reaches of civilisation. I always thought it was a metaphor.
It turns out that the old-timers were referencing a real thing.
This site marks the original «astro station” established in 1887 by the Surveyor General. The stump was used to hold large scientific equipment that took measurements to establish latitude and longitude in Blackall with the fixtures later used to position towns from Brisbane to Boulia via Roma and Charleville. This established the positions of important centres from which survey work for the colony could be connected, ensuring accurate mapping of the entire state.
This is a replica, as the original one was destroyed in a bushfire a hundred years ago, but it stands on the same site.
As a lover of language, I was tickled pink!
I saw a few of these bottle trees by the side of the road.
All of this green by the highway meant that it would be enticing for grazing animals. I had to keep a close watch.
As the day went on, I began to see more and more wild goats.
The red earth is still here, but I’m seeing it less and less.
Consider this photo as a warning!
If you’re ever in Charleville and see this “Historic House” – don’t go into it. It was the biggest waste of $10 I’ve ever spent. The very deaf man at the door told me that it was full of a collection that a man had carefully curated.
It wasn’t.
It was like a Bower Bird in human form had grabbed anything old that they came across and shoved it into this house. At least Bower Birds only take things that are coloured blue. This guy just exhibited everything.
It was a waste of time.
I was doing 110 km/hr down the highway and I doubled back to get this photo. Someone out here has great taste in music.
I saw a sign that pointed to “The Beach”. Here, in the middle of the country??? I swung the wheel and took a look.
It was nothing. But I did get to see these lovely horses.
I was driving along, listening to Art Simone’s podcast ‘Concealed’ when out of nowhere this sign jumped out at me. I jammed on the brakes to take this shot.
Victoria.
South Australia.
The Northern Territory.
Queensland.
And now New South Wales.
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Remember when I said that when we left Melbourne my car was at 100,000 km?
It’s now on 105K.
Not bad, hey? I drove just over 1,000 km today and I was tired. One motel wanted to charge me $220 for one night and I told them that I’d rather sleep in my car (though I really hoped that I wuldn’t have to.)
Anyway, right down the road in a dodgy part of town is a pub that let me stay for $75/night. It doesn’t have an ensuite but seeing as I’m the only female staying here who’ll be using the girls’ bathroom, I’m ok with that.
***
The next day, I woke up and it was POURING! Who has ever heard of rain in Bourke? I told a couple of people at the visitors Centre that they’ve clearly been telling lies to the rest of us and they smiled and said, “We’ve been hanging out for this rain.”
I could believe them.
The trouble was, when it rains it makes all of the dust in Bourke turn to mud.
I discovered this when I went to the graveyard to look for Fred Hollows’ grave. I was wearing my new summer sandals. I was jumping from hillock to hillock to try and avoid getting the mud into them.
This graveyard was separated into sections depending on which religion the deceased subscribed to.
I felt sorry for this lone grave, so far from home.
Old graveyards like this one have lots of sad graves. This was a hard place to bring up kids, back in the day.
Sadder still was this grave. There’s no headstone or anything else to mark it except this fence, which is on its way out.
A little lamb with her to keep her company…
After wrestling with Google Maps, I finally realised what it was trying to tell me and I found Fred Hollows’ grave.
What an extraordinary man he was.
The whole site is in the shape of an eye.
There’s a large rock and a sculpture here that the family commissioned.
…
How sad his parents must have been.
This was interesting. It’s a mosque that existed for the Ghan camel herders.
Then I discovered another silo, of course.
“This project was to celebrate the accomplishments of Percy Hobson, a Gnamba man who won the Gold medal for high jump at the Commonwealth Games, Perth in 1962 jumping 2.11m which was the Olympic record at the time, Percy trained himself for this accomplishment by practising to jump in his backyard in Bourke.
Along with the boxer Jeff Dynevor, who won a Bantamweight Gold Medal at the same games, Hobson was the first Indigenous athlete ever to win Commonwealth Gold for Australia.”
It is just outside the main drag.
Then I headed back to the Info Centre to eat lunch and piggyback off their free wifi to get some blogging done. They have some sculptures along the right side of the centre to celebrate the indigenous people.
I think this one was the best.
I stayed most of the afternoon. As time passed, the rain stopped and it got humid.
I went back to the pub, took my wine to the verandah on the first floor overlooking the street and watched as at 6 PM, the stampede began as the pub’s dining room opened and the locals converged.
I ate the first crumbed cutlets I’ve had since childhood – they’re too expensive now! – and crawled into bed. Only a couple more days’ driving to go before the Crazy Roadtrip turns into the Lazy Roadtrip.
The first thing I did when I left the motel was to find Arno’s Wall. It’s behind a pub and is simply a place where a guy called Arno kept putting random things in a wall he was making.
As you do…
He even put the kitchen sink into it!
In a nod to what Winton is really famous for, here is a public bin on top of a dinosaur foot.
A couple of years ago, I went on a Little Adventure to Narracoorte in South Australia, where I saw ancient fossils in the caves. Those were little ones.
Winton is famous for the huge fossilised animals they’ve found here. You know, the ones as big as the Jurassic Park Brontosauruses.
In fact, one of the ones I saw is the biggest animal to ever walk on land.
Honestly, the flies were a little annoying, but I wouldn’t have called them ‘extreme.’
The dinosaur museum is at the top of one of those long, flat mounds that jut out from the flat ground here. This one is about 75 metres high.
The Australian Age of Dinosaurs is very interesting. When I mentioned on Facebook that I was heading to Winton, my ex-sister-in-law Deb said that I mustn’t miss it.
She was correct.
They have a life-sized statue of a meat-eating dinosaur at the front door. They found his bones mixed in with a huge vegetarian dinosaur. Possibly, she was stuck in the mud by the inland sea and as he moved in for the kill, she managed to kill him first. When she died, they both were covered with water and then covered with silt, preserving their bones.
His bones are a lot lighter and smaller than hers. “We think that, if he wasn’t entangled with her, his bones would never have been preserved and we wouldn’t know of his existence,” said one of the guides.
As an aside, “his” and “hers” are guesses. There’s no way to tell the gender from the bones.
The incredible thing about the Winton dinosaurs is that they were found around 5 minutes ago.
In 1999, a local farmer called David Ellot was going about his business on his land when he noticed a massive femur sticking up from the ground. He was used to seeing cattle bones around the place, but this was something else.
Long story short – he knew that the layer of what’s called “Blacksoil” in the area has air pockets in it. He knew from what happened to his fences that it pushes up things that are buried within it.
It turns out that there’s a layer of dinosaur fossils back from when this place was a tropical inland sea. No one had any idea that they were there. And these dinosaurs are far larger than anyone had ever seen in Australia. It was a massively important find.
A few years later, David Elliot realised that unless he opened a museum of some sort, these fossils were probably going to be left to themselves. He opened this place and they have 2 digs a year. They don’t want to do any more than that because they’re harvesting more fossils in those two digs than they can hope to process in years.
There’s a bit of a backlog. Some of these fossils date back to 2011.
Someone asked the guide if there was anything new that they’d found recently.
“As it happens, yes there is”, she said. “We found something that we’re all very excited about, but before we can unveil it to the world it has to undergo peer reviews and testing. It took a full ten years for the news about Chooky to be released.”
Don’t worry. Chooky is coming…
Here I am, touching a 93 million-year-old fossil. As you can see, they ask that you be gentle with them. This comes from a Sauropod that was an adult and was around 18 metres/59 feet long.
Isn’t life wonderful?
Now here’s Chooky! He’s a smallish crocodile who was found to have the remnants of a dinosaur in his stomach. This is the first evidence anywhere in the world of crocodiles preying on dinosaurs.
This is a painting of how this place looked like back then. It’s funny. You see these flat fields and old trees and think that this is how this place would have always looked. Couldn’t be more wrong.
This is a fossilised branch from a tree. It was impossible to get the whole length in, but the tree it came from would have been over 100m tall. It would have towered over the whole hill we were standing on.
Here is one of the volunteers painstakingly scraping away the dirt and stuff from the surface of a fossil.
The next tour I went on was a mix of media and fossils. Here she is standing beside a replica of the meat-eater that I was running from outside.
Here’s how big the Sauropods were. These were 3m tall and had tiny little brains. They didn’t need much brain power – they were vegetarian and were surrounded by jungle vegetation.
Here is a sauropod’s femur next to that of a Brahmin bull.
They have so far found lots of the lower portions of animals. They think that, as happens nowadays with cattle, the elderly animals who are getting weaker walk down to the water to drink, then get stuck in the mud and can’t get loose. Scavengers attack the top parts of them and remove the skin and smaller bones, so only the large leg bones, ribs etc are left to fossilise.
I took many more notes, as it’s all fascinating, but I’ll leave it now. (I’m sitting at the Bourke Tourist Information Centre using their wifi and I’m all by myself. It’s nearly wine o’clock so I want to finish this soon.)
Yet another reminder to drive carefully!
I was on the road, with only one bar on my phone, when Tom32 rang.
He and Sophie have just come back from Adelaide, where they had a long weekend.
“I asked her to marry me, and she said YES!” he said.
I screamed with joy… and then my phone went dead.
ARGH! I wanted to hear the rest of it all. I was in torment! I had to wait a few hours later when I grabbed the Wifi from my motel.
(I learned why my phone is not constantly in touch, even though I’m with Telstra. It turns out that because I’m with Aldi Mobile – which uses the Telstra network – I’m being punished by Telstra. Damn.)
So now I have another daughter! What with Georgia last year, daughters are coming out of the woodwork!
I’m so happy that she said yes. She’s very good for my son and I think they make a great couple.
It turns out that there was a lookout right behind my motel in Mt Isa, so up I went. It had a painted silo there, but this was the view that dominated. I have to say that I’m not particularly drawn to Mt Isa and I was eager to get on the road and see what else there was to see.
I was listening to a ‘Casefile’ episode about the death of a young boy called Aaron Bacon who was sent to a wilderness training camp in terrain probably very similar to what I was travelling through. The poor boy. It made it all very vivid as I was looking at the dust and dirt.
The place looks as dry as a chip. Despite what friends online were telling me about flooding further down, there was no evidence of it here.
There was a memorial marker alongside the highway for Burke and Wills. I’ve always had a soft spot for these guys, ever since I read a book about their failed expedition when I was a child. They passed through here on their way up towards the Queensland coast.
When I was with the Ligas at the second salt lake, I learned from the information board that the Dig Tree is still there.
omg.
(Maybe there’ll be another road trip one day…?)
Almost right next to the Burle and Wills memorial was this. Bad luck keeps happening, it seems.
A bit further down the road, there was a sign towards “Chinaman’s Creek Dam.” You know the rules… I turned the wheel.
It was a beautiful spot. There was a Barbeque area and playground that was filled with locals gathering for a kid’s birthday. People were using the barbie to cook snags and the smell was fantastic.
I sat there for a while, with my Antarctica Pee bottle filled with water, munching some chicken crimpy shapes. I was enjoying the view. It was nice to be in a beautiful place that others were using too.
This was sticking up by the side of the road and I liked the look of it. I snapped this without getting out of the car.
I wanted to show you what most of the creeks look like here, so I stopped the car at the bridge over Scrubby Creek and walked back to take the photo.
This country is DRY.
Cicadas were singing – and it was the middle of the day. In Melbourne, I’m only used to hearing them at dusk. The heat was beating down.
It’s a part of the country that I’m glad I’m seeing, but I wouldn’t want to live here. I don’t know how the early settlers, especially the women with those long skirts and petticoats, managed to survive with no airconditioning.
When you see lots of hawks, it means there’s fresh meat on the road. On some stretches, there were lots of dead kandaroos.
It was nearing midday and I was thinking that I’d better find somewhere to grab some lunch.
Yes, I’m not kidding. They shot the opening sequences of ‘Crocodile Dundee’ at this very pub.
And they’ve been milking it ever since.
I bought a ginger beer and a magnet in deference to the sign. They didn’t offer anything to eat, but I stayed for about half an hour, talking to the woman behind the bar and a couple of other tourists.
It fulfilled the extrovert inside this introvert. I’ll be good without human contact for days now!
The original bar in the movie was blue, and they’ve kept it around the back. She was most insistent that I go and see it, so I did.
He looks like he’s had too much whiskey, doesn’t he?
Then it was back on the road again, in search of lunch.
Little did I guess what was going to happen at the roadhouse I stopped at!
OMG – these brolgas are so BIG! They walked so close to me, without a care in the world. I was beside myself!
The roadhouse here was as grimy as Liga would have liked. There were crumbs all over the table where I sat and the owners sat at a table next to me where they’d obviously been sitting all day as it was piled high with stuff. The chips I ordered for lunch (to be safe) were ok, but I left half of them. I wanted to get out of there and keep going.
Apologies for the wonky horizon line. This is what the country looked like, going for miles. When they say there’s nothing in the middle of Australia, believe them.
This is what Winton looks like on a late Sunday afternoon.
Yep. Dead.
I was able to find a motel who gave me a room for $165 – ouch. But their wifi was excellent.
I spent most of the afternoon talking to friends and family.
Instead of getting a Roomba mower, these people have gone for the prototype.
The plaque reads:
AB. (BANJO) PATERSON (1864-1941) WROTE THE WORDS TO WALTZING MATILDA AT DAGWORTH STATION IN THE WINTON SHIRE IN 1895 TO A TUNE PLAYED BY CHRISTINA MACPHERSON. THE FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCE WAS IN WINTON AT THE NORTH GREGORY HOTEL ON APRIL 6TH 1895. WALTZING MATILDA IS NOW KNOWN THE WORLD OVER AS AUSTRALIAS’ UNOFFICIAL NATIONAL ANTHEM AND INSPIRATION. DURING HIS LIFE BANJO WROTE MANY POEMS ABOUT THE BUSH AND SET THE TREND FOR AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE IN ITS INFANCY.
Now you know!
Again, I have a soft spot for Banjo Patterson. Mum and Dad gave me a children’s book of poems called ‘The Animals Noah Forget’ about Aussie animals. It’s funny how much you carry with you from childhood.
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So far, this is how far I’ve driven. The car was at 100,000 KMS as we left Melbourne, so it’ll be interesting to see how far my trusty little Golf drives before we get back home.
And look at this. I’d just connected with Evan28 when I glanced out of the window and saw these brolgas enjoying the water being sprayed on the lawn outside the motel.
