Gismo Queen and her King

Day 30 - Dubbo to Ariah Park - Tuesday 28th May 2024

How good was that gas heater last night?! It must have got down to about zero but we were toasty warm in our van, even if I did worry serval times in the night that we were going to run out of gas (and I didn’t fancy going outside in subzero temperatures to change the gas bottle!).

The day dawned with brilliant sunshine so we decided to brave shorts again, figuring this might be our last chance this trip. We were on the road by 9am and it was easy driving today. Elevenses was in a roadside rest area just outside of Parkes, coincidentally where we camped a night back in 2012 in our Jayco Discovery! We got fuel in West Wyalong and had lunch there in a park. 40 minutes later we pulled into this fabulous camp.

 Set up by the local community to try and encourage people to visit their town, it has power  (if you go and get a key for power box from the pub in town), water, fire pots, firewood, an attractive setting in amongst the football, netball and golf venues. We got the fire going early - we still had firewood from Narrabri but also used some of theirs. We did walk into town to buy milk. Apparently Ariah Park is known as the town of “wowsers, bowsers and peppercorn trees”. The town has many heritage buildings, most of the shop ones are empty but have decorated shop windows at least. There are indeed some heritage fuel bowsers along the main street and plenty of peppercorn trees but I don’t know about the wowsers. We felt a bit guilty that we only spent $18 in the local store and resolved that next time we would have a meal in the pub.

Back to camp to a roaring campfire, drinks and nibbles and then a delicious corned beef prepared by Jude in the DreamPot. The immediate area came alive when the footy oval lights came on and plenty of people arrived - for footy training! And it was even AFL! Apparently  plenty of successful AFL players have come from here (Just up the road in Mirrool is the annual “Kick the footy over the grain siloes” event! Anyway, footy training was over by 8pm and we settled in to our fire and music, enjoying our sort-of last travelling night on the road.

posted by Tracey @ 10:16 pm