Rhonda Bracey: At Random

We left Dubbo and headed out on the Golden Highway, retracing some of our route from yesterday (as far as Dunedoo). We stopped in the little town of Merriwa for lunch at the bakery. My husband’s pie was ‘ordinary’ and my BBQ chicken wrap was horrible (cold, made with Chinese Hoisin sauce, and tiny chicken squares that looked preserved!). Then it was back on the road via Denman and Branxton, just south of Singleton.

At Branxton we turned south to Cessnock, where we’d decided to stay for two nights to make our trip to the Hunter Valley wine region worthwhile. We checked into the Best Western Wine Country Motor Inn ($110/night for a standard room), which is right in the heart of Cessnock. Very convenient! And surprisingly quiet.

Right next door to the Best Western was the Cessnock Rugby League Supporters Club, so we wandered over there to play some pool, and discovered that they had meals for $10 a head, including a glass of beer or house wine!

We couldn’t go past the pork roast… The red wine I had was from a cask of de Bortoli Cab sav, and was perfectly acceptable. And for $10 a head, it was a really good deal. The $3 per game pool table was a bit rich, though.

The whole reason for going to Dubbo was to visit the Western Plains Zoo (now part of Taronga Zoo). We’d always said that we should do this trip ‘one day’ — especially after we visited the San Diego Wildlife Park at Escondido some years back — and now that day had arrived.

The zoo is just on the outskirts of Dubbo, so is really easy to get to (once you’re in Dubbo, of course!). But it’s pricey. It costs $45 per adult for entry to the zoo. This is for a two-day pass, but there’s no option to purchase a single day ticket — you can only purchase a two-day pass. On top of that are charges for bike hire (min. $15 per bike; $21 each for a bike with 3 gears; $69 for a golf cart-style buggy), and all hire charges are for a minimum of 4 hours, so no option to hire for an hour.

You can drive around the zoo in your own car (about a 5 km loop) and get out and walk to the exhibits, or walk the entire loop, or hire a bike or buggy. We hired bikes, but because the sun was out and had some heat, we had to purchase peaked caps and sunscreen too (another almost $50). All up our trip to the Dubbo zoo cost us around $200… And we were only there for about two hours.

Why two hours? Well, to be honest, that’s all it took. We drove around slowly on the first pass, stopping for me to get out and take some pictures. Then we bought the caps and sunscreen, filled in all the paperwork for the bike hire, then rode around the loop and some of the inner trails, again stopping to take photos etc. It really only took two hours. And we’re not at all fit. A fit rider would so it in much less, even allowing for stopping and taking photos. (Pictures are here)

We considered our expenses for those two hours our charitable contribution to the zoo…

So, what to do for the rest of the day? It was around lunchtime, and we’d booked a room for two nights, so we couldn’t check out. The bike hire attendant had suggested we go to the Hunter Valley and do a ‘slight detour’ via Dunedoo to see Gulgong and Mudgee, so we decided to do that drive this afternoon.

Gulgong is a very historic town, famed for its connection to Henry Lawson (famous Australian poet), and is know to most older Australians as ‘the town on the $10 note’… that’s until they redesigned the notes back in the 1980s and took it off the $10 note! Gulgong has narrow streets, massively high kerbs, and a so-so bakery where we bought pies for lunch.

Next stop was Mudgee, where the streets were much wider. Pretty town, though we didn’t stop for any length of time. If we’re out that way again, we’d stop there and perhaps check out some wineries in the region.

From Mudgee, we headed in a loop back to Dubbo via Ulan (a dot on the map and nothing more when you get there!), then towards Wellington, then took the Goolma road direct to Dubbo.

A comment about the roads out here in western NSW — they are narrow, have narrow shoulders, have a LOT of truck traffic, and are really potholed, patchy and rough in many places. They need serious work. I thought some of the country roads in Western Australia were bad — they’re far better than the NSW roads we travelled on.

We had an early dinner when we got back into Dubbo, at a place we’d spotted earlier — SSS BBQ Barns. My husband had the full rack of BBQ pork ribs ($28.95), and I had a half rack (more than enough; $12.95). They were delicious! The meat melted right off the bones and you really didn’t have to handle the bones at all. Bonus points for the country music they played too!

Monday 26 October was a wild, wet, and cold day. Some parts of Sydney had 110 mm of rain that day (some 5+ inches)…

It was time to test out the GPS! We had to get from the airport, out of Sydney, and on our way to Dubbo, and we expected to take much of the day getting there. My work colleague is called Susan, so my husband decided to call the Garmin GPS ‘Susan’. I fired her up, entered Dubbo as our destination, and sat back to let her guide us through Sydney and up and over the Blue Mountains. Sounds easy, right?

Not so much. Here are some problems I found with my first-ever GPS user experience:

• GPS units want you to know where you’re going. They REALLY want an address. A specific address. Not just a city like ‘Dubbo’. I learned later that you can enter a highway number and it’s happier. But when you don’t know the highway numbers either, that’s a problem!
• GPS units want to take you onto toll roads. Which is not a problem if there are cash booths for people like us from out of state in rental cars and without fancy electronic passes. But when there’s no cash booth (as announced prior to the M7 Motorway), we tend to freak out. What will happen? Will we be fined lots of money? How can we avoid the toll roads? Will some barrier come down and crush us if we go through a tool booth without an E pass? (we don’t have toll roads in Western Australia…) We exited the M5 before the M7, but Susan kept wanting to take us back on to the M7. I was trying hard to figure out where we were using a street directory; we were in some industrial area… Fortunately, I spotted a service station and the lady there very helpfully gave me the toll road phone number and told us that we could go on the toll roads as long as we called the number within 48 hours and paid via credit card over the phone. That was a relief! So Susan got us back on to the M7. I later found out that there’s a ‘Detour’ button on the GPS and pressing that means that the GPS recalculates the route based on the direction you’re currently going in.
• GPS units take you in directions you don’t expect. I had a mud-map of the area (a single page map that encompassed much of NSW), and I expected that Susan would direct us off the M7 on to the M4/Highway 32, which goes up over the Blue Mountains via Katoomba. A nice, wide, dual carriage highway that I’ve seen from the train to Katoomba. Nope. Susan decided that we should go past the M4 exit and on towards Richmond, where she then took us on a circuitous route via Kurrajong over the Blue Mountains on a weirdly named road called ‘Bells Line of Road’. I’m sure it was very scenic had the clouds not been covering much of the road and had it not been raining buckets! It was a narrow, winding, tree-lined, single-lane road, with no shoulders for the most part. We eventually got to Lithgow, bypassing Katoomba altogether… Another thing I found later — I could have changed Susan’s settings to avoid toll roads and to take the most direct route.

Once we got to Lithgow, we were out of the heavy rains and only encountered patchy showers. It was still cold though. We were also on the right road from Lithgow onwards (Highway 32), and so we drove on through Bathurst, Orange, and Wellington, before finally reaching Dubbo late in the afternoon. It’s pretty countryside — more undulating than I expected. I guess I expected flat plains, not rolling ones!

We booked in to the Cattleman’s Inn in Dubbo for two nights ($115/night), then had a lovely — but HUGE! — meal in their restaurant. We both had the steak — a 600g ribeye on the bone, with peppercorn sauce, mashed potatoes, and a side salad (for only $2.50 extra, not $7 like some places charge) — along with a 2008 PepperJack Cabernet Sauvignon. Yummy!

Next stop: Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo (the reason for going to Dubbo!)