Tales From The Trax: Day 3 & 4

We stayed in a “cheap” motel in Forbes, where road-trains went past 2 metres from our front door. As I always say, you always get what you pay for!

At 11:47pm Saturday night, as we lay fast asleep, my phone started beeping (When VMR have a call-out, it pages through to my phone, with a siren like tone). I jumped out of bed, out to the car and was half way down the main drag looking for a boat ramp before I properly woke up. Feeling pretty stupid, I went back to the motel to be lulled to sleep by 300 trucks going through 18 gears.

We left Forbes early, heading up the Newell, approaching Parkes, we saw a sign to the Parkes Dish (radio telescope). We have been told you can’t go passed the dish without a visit, so in we went.

A huge car park awaited us, signs that they have a mass of visitors every year. Approaching the information complex, you pass a large dish, about 5 metres in diameter. We walked up to have a look, there was a sign instructing one of us to walk to another dish around 100 metres across the beautiful native garden.

I walked across and saw a number of young school children all trying to get to the step you stand on. No problem, I just pushed them out of the way, and stood on the step.

The idea is you look straight ahead into the middle of the dish and whisper a message to your friend standing, and looking into the other dish. Remember you are at least 100 metres apart

Carolyn was talking to a lady, so I just whispered, “I hate school kids”, I didn’t realise not only can you hear it, but it is quite loud. It was then I found out the lady Carolyn was talking to was the school teacher. Anyway all was good as she said, she hates kids too. The perfect teacher in my mind.

The Visitors Centre at The Dish

The dish

The "Whispering" dish

A quick escape and into the centre, where there are fantastic photos of outer space, models of planets and all sorts of space souvenirs.

The girl at the counter told us she was about to start a 3d movie in the theatrette, showing all sorts of space stuff, which runs for about 30 minutes, so we bought a pensioner ticket and went in.

I must say, the movies shown were fantastic, that is until about 20 minutes in, when Carolyn’s head hit my shoulder, she was fast asleep. Next thing I knew the girl was tapping me on the shoulder, everyone had left, and I had a great big bit of drool dropping onto my tee shirt. Another quick escape and back on the road.

We drove until we saw a sign to the Warrumbungle National Park, and thought we would do the detour and sus it out, and did we like what we saw. A magnificent camp ground, with what looked like great walks. We went to the ranger’s station and were greeted by a magnificent lady ranger. (Something about a lady ranger in uniform), where we were given lots of maps and information.

As they did not have any accommodation, we decided to stay in a place just out of the park and return the next day to go for a walk. Another great thing about being a peno, you get free entry into all NSW National Parks.

Early Monday we drove back into the park, thinking we would do a short walk, we decided as I have not done much walking since November, we would pick an easy one. However, “easy walks” is not really a term we fully understand. Looking at the map, we decided to follow Spirey Creek to Spirey View. This looked like a fairly easy 10 kilometre return walk, perfect.

Perfect until we reached the 5 kilometre mark, and saw a sign “to Breadknife and the Grand High Tops Loop” Cazza looked at me, I looked at her, and off we went. And what a walk it was. Walk?? I mean climb, steep, slippery, path not well marked, but the views from the top were awesome.

As it was a bit hard to see the track, we decided to climb the 1 kilometer back down and head home. However, we reached the bottom and said “what are we doing? Are we going soft? So, nothing else to do, but back up the same path. When we arrived at the top, we had a bit of a look around, and low and behold, there was a track (of sorts), so down we went.

Magnificent Views everywhere you look

On the way, we rounded a corner and there were about 10 goats, some females, 2 very big Billy goats, complete with big curly horns and a couple of kids. They spotted us and took off up the hill through the scrub. One little black kid stood there watching us. Cazza saw a cute little baby goat, I saw a magnificent stew in the camp oven.

We tried to shoo it off, but it looked confused and started bleating. We kept walking, it followed. Carolyn took off rather quickly saying she did not want it to think she was its mother, I kind of think, it was thinking I was its mother, with my massive man boobs, I must have looked very attractive to a baby goat.

About 1 kilometre later, the real mother started calling it from way up on a ridge, we could just see her, she must have been nearly a kilometre away, and the baby called and called and finally decided its real mum was the way to go.