A big thank you to Walgett for providing the RV Park at the Alex Trevallian Rotary Park on the southern edge of town. What a great spot. The park has lots of flat spaces to park, toilets, a dump point, potable water, BBQs and a lovely little lake with a fountain. There is a brand new concrete walking path to take you into town. Self contained travellers can camp for 24 hours. Well done Walgett.
After getting a load of washing done, using the dump point, and filling up with water we set off to continue our journey southwards to home. We were really starting to look forward to getting home after 7 weeks on the road.
Crops in the area looked amazing. They must have had such good rains. Vast fields of green crops, probably wheat, look so lush and healthy. Herds of cattle could only just be seen above the grass as the grass was so high. Again we saw emus.
The tiny town of Coonamble has a painted water tower and we pulled up so I could get pictures of that. The theme of this art work was galahs. I could see why. As we drove through this area we both noticed that there were lots of galahs.
The river in Coonamble was very full and we commented to each other how green the lawns were around the houses of this little town.
We arrived in the tiny town of Gulargambone and stopped to have a look at the fabulous bullock sculpture. The sculpture is the work of local Coonamble Brian Campbell who has created a bullock team pulling a wagon. the six individual bullocks are made from steel rod and recycled wire netting and the sculpture took 6 months to complete. It is really impressive.
Scattered around town are galah sculptures made from old corrugated iron. They are fabulous.
Artist John Murray, whose works we have seen before on painted water tanks, has painted the bus stop with his quirky bird paintings. Love them.
The water tower in Gulargambone is painted with a gorgeous painting of a Kingfisher. We went for a drive along the small main street and I loved the colourfully painted shop fronts. Gulargambone has a lovely big park next to the river.
The further south we went the colder it became. The sky became overcast and cloudy. Only 20km from Dubbo it started to sprinkle. We were traveling on the Newell Highway after passing through the town of Gilgandra. We’ve been through Gilgandra many times before so we didn’t stop at all. Along the Newell Highway we noticed that the wattle trees were in full flower. They looked so pretty with their bright yellow flowers against the green of the trees and shrubs.
It was hard to believe that we’d been in shorts and t-shirts for weeks and now we were back to Winter weather. Brrrr.
We stopped for fuel in Dubbo then tried to find a park in the CBD. This wasn’t easy as most of the streets in Dubbo’s CBD have angle parking. That’s no good for our 8m long motorhome! We eventually found a parallel parking space opposite St Andrews Chapel and walked a couple of blocks to meet up with our cousin Fiona at the Commercial Hotel in Dubbo. We were so pleased she was able to meet us for lunch. We really enjoyed seeing her and hearing all her news.
It was such a miserable rainy day and cold. It was only 11 degrees after lunch. We had to park a couple of blocks from the pub and it was miserable walking back to the motorhome. As we crossed the big bridge over the Macquarie River in Dubbo we saw the river was very full. Major roadworks were being done to the intersection of the Newell and Mitchell Highways so it was slow going getting around the corner.
We continued on in the miserable afternoon and arrived in Forbes about 5pm. That was far enough for one day. Forbes has a free camp at Wheogo Park for self-contained travellers and we have stayed there many times so we headed straight there and were a bit surprised that there was no one else there already. We’d only just got set up when there was a knock on the door and we found a couple of council rangers there wanting to know if we’d checked in using the QR code. As we hadn’t done that we were able to do it with them.
It was so cold we put the diesel heater on, put on our PJ’s and got into bed to watch a movie. What else do you do on a cold night? We were both looking forward to getting home the next day.
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