Day 1 – Saturday – Newcastle to Spring Hill Rest Area (Between Wilcannia & Broken Hill)

 The day started at 3.30am.  Scott went to wake the boys up and I jumped in the shower, the boys woke easily and even did a couple of fist pumps in the air – our adventure was finally here!

We left home at 4.01am – only minute behind schedule.  This should have hinted at more delays to come.

An hour down the track, and only 5 minutes down the Golden Highway, a Skippy the size of Godzilla decided to play chicken with us. Now I was happily in snooze land, the boys were sound asleep and I awoke to Scott cursing at the giant marsupial – Skippy won this battle as Scott pulled the van up just before impact.  I helped out from the passenger side by trying to put my foot through the floor to stop us.

We stopped for our first break just after sunrise on the side of the road near the Cassilis turn off, the cuppa was hot, the air was fresh and the ground underfoot was frozen with a thick frost brrrr.  Recharged and ready to go, we swapped drivers and headed off once more.

I drove through Dubbo and onto our morning tea / early lunch stop at Narromine.  During this part of the drive we left the ranges behind and the terrain flattened out and the drive was becoming easier.

 

With the kilometres ticking by we soon passed through Nyngan and Cobar, the countryside was flat and the road loomed ahead with little change to the landscape.  

We saw a lot of wildlife along this stretch, Emus, sheep and hundreds and hundreds of wild goats – they were everywhere but luckily the goats seemed to have a bit more common sense about them as we only saw one dead goat for every 50 dead kangaroos on the road.

As the sun was getting lower in the sky this made us a little nervous, so after driving through Wilcannia we came to the conclusion that we would NOT make it the extra 2 hours to Broken Hill today.  With light starting to fade and having seen far too much road kill to take on Skippy for a second time, we decided to be the Bald, Red & Blonde Nomads and free camp.

We looked up the “Camps” book and saw that there were a few possibilities on the other side of Wilcannia. We opted for Spring Hill Rest Area, giving us an easy 120km drive to Broken Hill the next morning.  We were pleased with our choice, and set up camp for the night with a beautiful outback sunset as our backdrop.

For those of you interested this rest area offers great facilities, just back from the road, good toilets, playground and water which would be why there were 6 other vans here when we pulled in for the night.

With camp set up and an easy dinner of 2 minute noodles it was time to get some rest for the next day of adventures, with all four of us in bed by 8.30pm zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz