Start time: 8:50am, arrival: 5pm
We had a leisurely breakfast and pack-up this morning ready for a departure of between 8:30 and 9am. We headed for Parkes to visit the Parkes Observatory, aka "The Dish"; a radio telescope observatory. It was one of several radio antennas used to receive live, televised images of the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969. We arrived about 10am but instead of heading straight for the cafe, we watched three 3D movies of different aspects of space exploration. It was then time for mornos. Greg had coffee and scones and Wendy had coffee and orange/almond cake. Greg got 2 huge scones with enough jam (fig) and cream to satisfy all four of us, but he ate the lot, and immediately said, “I shouldn’t have eaten that!”. A short time later we left the area to continue our journey.
The road, although nice and wide, was very lumpy and quite corrugated at times. The scenery was varied as well. We were hungry again just as we approached West Wyalong, so consulted WikiCamps for a good day area and chose one on the other side of town close to our turn off for Griffith. A lovely light, refreshing home-made salad in the park was our lunch and then we were off to Griffith. 145 km later we were approaching our final destination for today; the crops changed from cattle, sheep and wheat to vineyards and citrus. The vineyards all looked very green and in good nick.
We stopped at the Information Centre in town, mainly because it was where the caravan/RV parking was. We wanted to have a wander around town before making camp for the night. However, it was 39 degC outside and Y&G were feeling the heat a bit so suggested we make camp and then wander in the morning when it maybe cooler (doubt it). So, we picked a van park and headed back out of town the way we came in only to find it closed at 5pm. It had a number to ring, so we rang and five minutes later the lady came across to check us in. She let us have two sites each so we could drive through and stay hitched, which was nice of her.
After a short relax with a cold drink (water) it was down to the serious business of trying to cook all the veggies we had left as we would soon cross the border into SA and would have to give up all our fruit and vege. Fruit was not an issue as we knew we could easily eat it all by then but we had a huge Hippo Farm pumpkin that we did not want to give away. So, Wendy spent an hour chopping pumpkin to both boil and roast. Dinner was roast veggies and salmon for Greg and pork for Wendy.
The aircon got a good workout for the first time in ages as Wendy needed it to chop the pumpkin (she was still sweating even with the aircon on) and it stayed on all night.
Another late one
The Big Dish at Parkes
Scenery
Information Centre, Griffith
Fairey Firefly at Griffith
Griffith Pioneers and ex-Servicemens Memorial
Griffith Caravan Park, #23&33
Griffith sunset
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