Well, Ashara had organised to go up to Kate's farm, 30km West of Cobar for a week of the holidays. We took Alice up as well, leaving about 7am and getting to the farm about 4pm. Then Dijo and I stayed at Cobar motor camp for the night, and went down to Nyngan the next day, Monday.



This is the place of big paddocks!


and distances that stretch past the horizon through moving shallow lakes! :lol:


Interesting things appear on the road.. remember that 350ton dumptruck at Cadia mine...


This is bit of Nyngan, a typical smartish NSW country town

Hmm.. I recognise those three girls- Dijo, Ashara & Alice.

This is our little cabin- common in Aussie motor camps, they have everything you need with self-contained kitchen, bathroom & two bedrooms.


The camp is by the Bogan River, so it is quite green and birdlife is great. Every day there were magpie larks, wagtails, galahs & these red-rumped parrots on the grass.


The magpies came along and argued about who's trees they were, budgies came through, and there were whistling kites watching everyone!


On Tuesday Dijo went to look at a local mine about their dam, then we headed East to Gilgandra. The bumpy roads didn't improve, but I missed photgraphing the sign that said 110kph just before it said 'bumpy road'...


This was more vast fields with floating trees over the horizon. This was mid-April, so we ran the air-con on low only and cruised along in shorts & T-shirts.

We turned North for Lightning Ridge and drove though the cotton area


There were more strange things on the road..


and interesting signs! You have to worry when the roadside depth is marked at 2metres!


When we reached Lightning Ridge we stayed on a farm out of town. Not quite as flash as Nyngan!


but better than what they used to have! :lol:

They had a fire going every night, so it was braai time


and sitting by the fire reading books & sipping wine...


Completely silently, this tawny frogmouth was flitting from tree to tree around us-


The back of the farm was "interesting"


VWs, Commer vans, old Falcons, Holdens, Valiants, stuff from the 1920s and the 1940s-

I'm currently looking for a 'run-around' for Ashara to learn to drive in, and this KE70 Corolla sitting beside the owner's railway carriage house seemed a good start.

"Start" was something the Corolla hadn't done for a couple of years, so we will have to wait and see if the owner can drive it to Orange!

Then we drove out to the opal fields to the West of Lightning Ridge. Now you are really in the backblocks, very few people stay out there and this is the only business in 'town'.


It comes with 'cafe society' and everything from food to mining equipment!


So all the essentials are there..


All around are hillocks of drilled dirt and holes in the ground

The unlabelled unsealed roads are definately NOT for Altezzas


In fact this is the place all old trucks come to die!


There are ladders sticking up out of the ground beside the road


and some high-security ones are locked! The vertical pipes are air vents.


With the heavy trucks and industrial machinery, I wonder about tunnels everywhere under the roads

Although the whole area is full of little piles like these


This is where you really see the scale of the digging-


Back on sealed roads, we headed for Bourke, passing through small towns along the way.


Bourke itself was bigger and smarter than I expected.


We went down to the Darling River and saw the only lock built

You can see the channel for the ferries on the far side of the dam. The lock was to give Bourke a greater supply of water and allow ferries up to the town wharf. This is over 1000km from the rivermouth in South Australia, and was as far as the riverboats came up.


Things were pretty quiet over the dam at this time.


From Bourke it was South to Cobar. Now we had the best road of the trip, one that was properly made from edge to edge.


Not a gum tree in sight! The bush was quite different to what we had seen


and this is a snatched photo of a flock of budgies flying over the car.

This may or may not be Ayers Rock, but then again there are probably lots of them sticking up out of the flat terrain.


and by the time we got down towards Cobar the trees had dissapeared completely


There a strange purple-hairedgirl turned up claiming to be Ashara!


Heading South, it was back on the crap main highways of NSW. They used to have one wide lane of tar, so approaching cars each put one set of wheels in the dirt to pass. This smashed the edge of the seal completely for mile after mile, and when they sealed the roads & widened them, they sealed over the broken edge.

It is hard to photograph, but it runs just where the left-hand wheels run, and constantly bangs the suspension up and down.

Of course, the heavy trucks have ruined lots of the edges as well, even worse than the original road and it can go for miles too.

Back at Orange, 2500km later, it was time to think about cleaning the Altezza!


Next trip HERE