Sadly our road trip to Dubbo and surrounds is drawing to a close. Lisa wanted to treat her two girls Jessie and Lara and Toni's daughter Ginger to a special holiday and asked if we cared to tag along. Did we ever!
The girls certainly got to see and experience a way of life somewhat different to anything they had in the past. It included an overnight stopover in Denman, a small country town that produces its own weekly newspaper. Jessie in particular found the paper most enlightening as a means of understanding what life for young people growing up in a town of only a few hundred people was all about.
Another highlight was a night sleeping amongst the animals at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo.
We also had a night in Parkes, the town that played such a critical role in bringing to TV sets around the world, live pictures of the first landing on the moon.
Our visit was pretty fortuitous as this year is the fiftieth anniversary of that momentous event. We celebrated by downloading and watching the movie The Dish which tells all about it - though enhanced a little to improve the story. Even so, seeing it the night before our visit did answer a lot of questions the girls might have had about Neil Armstrong’s famous words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Our last two nights together were at Orange where we got to taste some of the beverage and culinary delights of a cold climate region. Most enjoyable.
From Orange Lis and the girls took the road to the Blue Mountains, where they were joined for a couple of nights by number two daughter Tone, while we headed down the mountain to the town of Richmond that will be, not too long in the future, an outer suburb of Sydney.
We had intended Richmond to be a one night stopover but we are enjoying it so much that we have extended to four nights. Very reminiscent of our free and easy life as grey nomads when we only packed up and moved on when the whim took us.
Our dallying was very fortuitous as Lis, Tone and the girls took a detour on their way home today to meet us this morning in the little community of Ebenezer for a Devonshire Tea at Australia’s oldest operating church. It was built only 21 years after the first fleet arrived in Sydney. There were undoubtedly others built in the meantime but none of them exist to this day.
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