Home is the Wanderer

/ Garrulous Gwendoline

Last day on the road: Friday 27th October 2023

After 16 nights / 17 days on the road, we have returned home. We pretty much circumnavigated New South Wales on this trip, or as much as could be accessed without needing a four-wheel drive vehicle, such as is called for to go waaaay outback to Tibooburra or Cameron Corner.

Red Dwarf, our 2012 Hyundai i30, did a great job. She started off red, turned brown along the way, and then shook off some of that dust as we continued. The Indian motorcycle in the background of the below shot, taken at Hay just before we left, was probably owned by the guy managing the motel. I was very taken with it.

Our last two nights were in Hay, and we intended to have one more overnight stop on the return leg, but, like a horse, once she (or Bill) got the scent of home, there was no stopping her. Each of us taking two x two-hour driving turnabouts, with short breaks for breakfast, loo stops and fuel (diesel), we left Hay at 7.30am and were pulling into the local shops at 4pm. That’s a distance of 692klm/430miles. And we even detoured up to a lookout in Gundagai and then drove around the town a little. This was our last glimpse of the Murrumbidgee River. In the below shot, the green patch in the middle distance is the original location of the town before the river broke its banks in 1852 and destroyed the place. You can read more about that here.

We didn’t stop to have a look at The Dog on the Tuckerbox which we have seen many times before. The legend of The Dog began in the 1850s with a poem Bullocky Bill by an otherwise unknown author ‘Bowyang Yorke’, about the partnership of the bullockies who opened up the land to settlers, and the dogs who accompanied them and guarded their possessions. (A tuckerbox being the place where the food was kept).

Bullock Waggon at Work. Source: http://www.travlar.com
Dog on the Tuckerbox, Source: http://www.travlar.com

Along the way we listened to an audio book. Excellently narrated by Australian actor David Tredinnick and written by historian Professor Roland Perry, Bill the Bastard: The Story Of Australia’s Greatest War Horse, brings to life the wartime legend of this horse, whose monument and exploits I touched on in an earlier post here.

We checked Red Dwarf’s tripmeter on arrival home. Including town sightseeing, we totalled 52 hours driving for a distance of 3753klm/2332miles, at an average speed of 77klm/47mi (the open road is usually 110klm/68miles but that town sightseeing screws the average), and fuel economy was 5.6 litres per 100 klm. Which is about US 42.5 / UK 35 gallons per 100 miles. Which is a jolly good thing as fuel continues to be jolly expensive.

Now the challenge is to catch up all the blog posts about our adventures and discoveries…

22 thoughts on “Home is the Wanderer”

    • Thanks for reading and commenting, Charlotte. I know you have a busy life and schedule.
      Me too at the moment, so I still haven’t written about what we did each day.
      But it’s good to get away from the capital cities and see our “outback”. Nothing like dear old England 🙂

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    • I thought of you often as we mooched around. I’d be hard-pressed to show you any part of Oz you haven’t seen for yourself!
      I let Google do the fuel economy calculations – so if you let me know the correct ones I’ll update the post 🙂

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  6. And . . . relax!! Sounds a wonderful trip wiht plenty of history and sightseeing. Like Bill, once we are heading home, we only stop for comfort breaks – and we leave really early to avoid traffic.

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    • Hah. Very little traffic wherever you go in these wide open spaces – except for this last leg which is a major transport corridor. But never bumper to bumper as you’d experience on the motorways.
      I have one ms report back from the editor. A bit more work to do and if I do it right she thinks I have a shot at publication. She still has the second ms to review.

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    • Always happy to hear your encouraging thoughts, Don. I fully intend to back up with all the stories and photos of the earlier bits. Might even get back to the Temora stories I never finished.
      But I do have an editorial report back on one of my manuscripts – so that is waiting for me also.
      Never a dull day…

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        • It’s a she 🙂 In the 1970s she was a Senator for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. In her Uni Days she is famed for coining/paraphrasing a saying “A woman needs a man likes a fish needs a bicycle.”

          But even she has mentioned I’m imposing a bit too much feminism on the reader and to remember it’s supposed to be a novel 🙂

          I have great faith in this editor. She got me across the line last time. And she has faith in this manuscript – “IF I do the work she is suggesting”.

          But she also says, “This is a very impressive manuscript and reflects many hours of thought and work to get it to this stage.” – and I know her well enough to know she is not just paying me lip service.

          There is hope for it yet 🙂

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    • Haha. Jackie will be on the money with the TV comedy. When we swapped our 6-cylinder Mitsubishi Magna (the Blue Beast) for the smaller Hyundai i30 – that formed the inspiration for the name.
      Your i10 is not available in Australia as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before. AS you can see from this trip, there is not a huge market for it.

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