Gulargambone, a surprise stop

Lets start with Gilgandra, although we did not stay in this town, we only stopped for water, it does deserve to be mentioned. In 1915, three brothers had an idea of starting a march to Sydney to recruit/enlist men interested in joining the army. 35 men left Gilgandra and at each town along their journey the men cried”COO-EE”, come and join us! By the time they reached Sydney there were 351 recruits. I found this to be so interesting, maybe because I always thought COO-EE meant something else… I won’t write down what I thought it was.

Gulargambone....

It took me so long to learn how to pronounce this small country town’s name, and for some reason I always though of guacamole. This town was not on our itinerary but because we left Dubbo late we were not going to make it to Pilliga on time which was our next destination. Pilliga is a free camp and when you go to free camps you want to be there early just because you don’t know what its going to be like. Anyway I just managed to catch the sign of caravan park and we stopped and I tell you what, it was one of the best things we could have done. The hosts, David and Bernadette are one of the nicest people you could ever meet. With thousands of stories from their 10 year travel adventure around Australia, they are humble, honest, funny and just so down to Earth. We had the whole back section to ourselves and they have quite a few animals so the boys absolutely loved feeding them, collecting eggs in the morning and just playing.

David and Bernadette have a great tradition of happy hour where he welcomes everyone and provides free nibbles (in winter its roasts or pizzas) with the aim to getting everyone out of the caravans to say hello. What was also great about this place is that we were able to leave the dogs behind and visit the Warrumbungle National Park, which was definitely not planned but greatly appreciated.

Highlight of this National Park are its telescopes, main one is the Siding Spring Observatory, the national park also has a very cool representation of the solar system where planets are placed all over the region according to the relative distance they have in space, the observatory being the sun. The observatory was very interesting itself as we got to walk around and inside it and really appreciate the enormity of the mirrors and how it works. We also watched some documentaries about the first stars and how they were born, that was definitely my homeschooling for the day!

The national park in itself, like most national parks was beautiful, a little dry from lack of rain, its a park that is recovering from a great bush fire in 2013, great walks but not for the faint hearted as the heat makes it quite a challenge.

Not far from the park we visited “sculptures in scrub”which is a hike where you meet 5 sculptures from local artist. My favourite one was the indigenous man looking out to the park.

The road to get to this hike was dirt and in areas corrugated and by the time we finished it was close to 6:30 pm with an hours drive to get back to the caravan. Now, one thing about driving in the outback is you never drive at dawn or dusk….quite true, there were kangaroos popping out of no where, but not just kangas, there were foxes, cows and worse calves (because they are unpredictable) and on top of all this, we were loosing light as the sun was going down. Quite an “interesting” drive to say the least, lets just say whatever hair my husband had left was gone. However, I thank his African driving skills which got us home.

On our last day we did some schooling, the caravan park’s great kitchen and dinning area was very “homey”and made it easy for us to focus.

We visited the local pool which was next to the caravan park and with a town population 250, we were the only one using it! We have been getting the kids to keep practicing their swimming and I must say their dives are looking really good.

Overall a great stay, not too expensive and once again met beautiful people.

Pilliga

We made it to Pilliga, I have a feeling that this town is even smaller than Gulargambone, if that's even possible. We got to the site and there was only one van parked, this is actually a relief as its nice to have some one around, especially when the site is by the main road. By the time we got there it was afternoon and there was absolutely no shade, very rough gravel with glass and a million flies. On a positive side there it was, like a mirage, the artesian bore baths, warm, free and there for us to use as many times as we want.

After setting up and loosing a couple of kilos from the sweat, we went over to the pool and loved it, we had planned to go again before going to bed but to our surprise (and should have known ) all the locals started showing up for late night dip. Before it got too crazy we managed to jump in a second time. By 10 pm it was packed with people coming in and out and loud music. Strangely enough I slept like a rock, could have been the warm bath before bed. First thing in the morning we went one last time, it was Carlos’ bday and it was a nice way to celebrate. Because we have lost sense of time he actually didn’t know it was his birthday until I reminded him. Next stop, Lighting Ridge.