Road Trip

We woke up at our campsite at Sundown National Park to the sound of screaming cicadas and decided to pack up and get out of there as soon as possible. We were originally lured to this campsite with the promise of a hot shower and a guaranteed spot with online booking. There were showers but the only running water on the grounds was in the river 500 feet away. If you wanted a hot shower you had to get water from the river and pour it into a donkey boiler they had next to the showers. The boiler was wood fired and I am assuming the water you used for a shower was from the condensed steam coming out of the boiler and you had to cool it and transfer it to an algae coated tank above the showers. I really don't know how it worked and we were not going to try it because we had no firewood and we had showered the day before and didn't need to work that hard to get one this morning. We had our stuff packed up and were on our way out within a half hour of waking up. The campsite was beautiful but I was getting a headache from the cicadas. I took my time driving out of the park stopping a couple times to remove medium sized sharp rocks off the road so that they would not scrape the bottom of our tiny car or ruin the tyres (Aussie spelling). As soon as we made it back to tar roads I apologized to the car and promised to never again take it on any gravel roads.
Shortly out of the park we stopped at an unmanned fruit stand we spotted the evening before. It felt weird raiding some strangers refrigerators in a small shed by the road but all the fruit and vegetables were in plastic bags and had a price written on them. We chose a bag of apricots and deposited three dollars into the coin box on the wall. Traveling a little further along we turned south onto the New England Highway and crossed the state line into New South Wales. The first town we came to was Tenterfield where we stopped just long enough to take a picture of the grand Stannum House. Evidently in the early 1880's this area was booming with the mining of tin, it was so prosperous that they built this building in hopes of it becoming the government house and the city becoming the capitol of the soon to be formed country of Australia.














From Tenterfield we stayed on the New England Highway through Glen Innes a town very proud of its Scottish heritage. Next we drove through Armidale which is known for its real fall season complete with changing colors of the leaves. From Armidale we headed back east on Grafton Road otherwise known as the Waterfall Way toward Coffs Harbour. We only had time to visit a couple of the many national parks along the way. We stopped at Oxley Wild Rivers National Park to have our picnic lunch. At this site the Chandler and Wollomombi rivers have cut a 400 meter deep gorge and at one vista you can see the falls of both rivers at once. Wollomombi is the second (or third depending on source) tallest water fall in Australia at 200 meters.

After lunch and taking in the amazing views I drove the winding mountain roads toward our next stop, the rainforest in Dorrigo National Park. As we got closer to Dorrigo the landscape got greener and more rolling. We were entering an area that used to be a major dairy production area. I was excited to see cows grazing on the green hillsides in a landscape that could have been in southern Germany.
The rainforest in Dorrigo were unique again but here they had a much better visitors center and a board walk that went straight out off the side of a slope into the tree tops of the forest. The easy to walk trails wound around trees draped with vines. Unfortunately we did not travel very far on the trails as I had a goal of making it to the next town to meet up with a fellow WestfaliaSurge milking equipment dealer that I may be working with. We also planned on continuing on the road to find our next campsite before dusk. Upon arriving in Bellingen we finally had cell phone reception so I called the dealer we were supposed to meet. He was not home yet and told us to have a look around town for a bit. We walked around the small touristy town and sat down to enjoy some home made gelato just off of the main street.

I called the dealer again and he was home so we went over to his house to talk about the possibility of me working with him on some future projects. We had a great chat before continuing on to find where we were to sleep for the night. Securing a campsite in New South Wales turned out to be a lot harder than back in Queensland where we started the day because they did not reserve campsites in any of the many national parks near where we driving. We did not realize that Aussies celebrate New Years Eve like we celebrate the fourth of July. The parks along the coast were packed with people who looked like they had been there for a week. After stopping at several campsites, driving many hours and calling several hotels, we gave up and headed inland to find an affordable motel which actually had a vacancy in the town of Casino. Driving the streets of Casino was eerily like we had found ourselves back in some small town in Nebraska. But it was comfortable and quiet as we saw the new year in by watching the spectacular firework display in Sydney on TV.