Ten years ago the Sydney Olympic Games opened, today we started the first travel leg of the safari with a drive of just under 200 kilometres.
Our day started just after 6:30am when “He” woke and decided to get up. It never ceases to amaze us that when we are home and going to work it is hard to get up, yet when we are travelling we never seem able to have a sleep in. Must be the country air!
We shared breakfast with the group at 8:00am and departed about 9:30am for what would be about a steady 3 hour drive. The caravan park at Mudgee (Mudgee Valley Caravan Park) provided us with an enjoyable stay with excellent clean amenities, a great camp kitchen and more importantly, happy and very friendly staff.
The safari works on the basis that you need to arrive at the destination by 5:00pm (for Happy Hour) and whilst there is a planned route, there is no obligation to follow the route provided that you inform the organisers. Our intention is to follow the planned route and we have programmed the GPS accordingly. 30 minutes after leaving we were checking maps to ensure we were going in the right direction as we had seen no one else since leaving. We actually travelled the entire route without seeing another motor home and that included a stop for about one hour at Coolah when we had an early lunch.
We planned to drive through Coonabarabran and head towards the Warrumbungles and the Siding Springs Observatory. The observatory is about 28 kilometres from town and requires a climb up a fairly steep hill. The Iveco powered up the climb in third gear and before we knew it, we were parked in the visitor car park.
There are several telescope located at the observatory including the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope that you can view from the visitor’s gallery.
From behind the telescope you are afford a view of the Warrumbungles and today it was bitterly cold with a frosty wind blowing from the south.
After purchasing a couple of items in the gift shop we headed back to town and a fuel stop, As we arrived at the fuel stop we received a telephone call from some friend who are currently travelling in Western Australia in a custom built 4 x 4 motor home. It was a great surprise to hear their voices.
We all joined together for happy hour after which we departed and cooked chicken schnitzel for tea. Winnebago have built a tow vehicle for the club that houses two BBQ’s and can carry all our supplies. Tonight the BBQ’s were christened. Unfortunately only one worked but the other will be sorted out tomorrow.
We were informed that ABC2 was showing a feature called “The Winnebago Man” but unfortunately we could not align the satellite dish to receive a signal. We detected a digital television signal from Orange but could not get a picture. Analogue was useless.
“She” managed to clobber her head whilst entering the motor home but all indications are that she will survive. We headed to bed relatively early and had a comfortable sleep.