Our holiday is all but over, with the exception of the drive home. A small matter of covering around 1680 kilometres. That’s just over a thousand miles to you and I. That’s like doing London to Edinburgh and back to London again. Except Melbourne to Brisbane is further. All clear now?
The quickest way back to Brisbane from Warrnambool according to Holly, my sat nav system, was to go back to Melbourne, then up. Which is what we did, almost. We took a small detour to go to Ballarat. More on that in a bit.
Our route takes us through Ballarat – Shepparton – West Wyalong – Forbes – Parkes – Dubbo – Coonabarabran – Moree – Goondiwindi – Toowoomba – and finally – Brisbane.
I will go into finer details about the journey later but for those who just want to get home fast, you can. You can cover the entire journey in 3 minutes…..
But if you want to know more about the journey, and the places we went through, you can always
Ballarat: There’s gold in them thar hills. Yep, plenty in Ballarat. Well there was. In 1858 they found a huge nugget. Over 2,000 ounces. The second biggest ever found in Australia, I think. They do still have gold there but mostly in jewellers shops. We didn’t stay long. It was certainly a town with character and it had a “theme park” reconstruction of how it was in the old gold days. That was worth a look.
Shepparton: Dairy capital of Australia and the first place in the world to paint cows.
West Wyalong: We didn’t stop, we drove straight through on the advice of a friend. I don’t know why.
Forbes: Had the eerie looking Gum Swamp.
Parkes: Home of “The Dish” – which was constructed back in the 60’s and responsible for beaming the pictures of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing to around 500 million people. It was impressive.
Dubbo: With it’s world famous zoo. Well, I read that somewhere but frankly, as a worldly wise person, I’d never heard of it. It is billed as a drive round zoo. But it’s no Whipsnade. You do drive round it, but then you have to get out and walk to the viewing platforms. In the car, drive, park, get out, walk, go back to car, start it up, drive, park, get out again. Repeat lots. Not very enjoyable.
Coonabarabran: The astronomy capital of Australia, due to no light polution I suspect. So lots of clear skies. Makes sense.
Moree: Nice enough place but I’ve never seen so many large heavy good vehicles with noisy compression brakes squeezing through such a tiny high street.
Goondiwindi: I liked it. It had FOUR pubs.
Toowoomba: It’s only an hour or so from Brisbane, I like this place. But it gets cold in the winter.
That’s it. Holiday’s over. Thanks for joining us. What are we gonna do now?