The home run

Day 10: Wellington to Young

We started off the day by visiting one of the caves at Wellington. We decided on the Phosphate Mine and the Bone Cave as this was probably going to interest Tom the most. At various points of the tour, you got to see bones that were embedded in the clay/rock which were dated between 800,000 and 1 million years old! Pretty amazing. And at the end of the tour, you got to hold some of the fossils. The skeletons of the Diprotadon (actually not a dinosaur, but a ‘megafauna’) and the Thylacoleo (also not a dinosaur but another megafauna) were in fact not real but casts. But still, the way they were portrayed as being slightly dug out of the ground was very effective and Tom thought it was just great!

As a bit of interest, the Diprotadon was like a really big wombat with large teeth and grew to heights of about 1.2m and length of around 3m. It weighed about 2.5 – 3 tonnes. Depending on the source, they became extinct only about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago. Thylacoleo was sort of like a marsupial lion and ate other early marsupial, including Diprotadon. They grew probably about as big as a female lioness.

OK lecture over.

The rest of the day was pretty much spent travelling to Young, although we did have a small visit to Cowra to see the site of the POW camp. By coincidence, an older lady that was at the site at the same time as us told me how her father used to own the property where the POW camp was and it was only recently sold out of the family to the government to be listed as a heritage site.

We amused ourselves today on our drive by counting the number of dead kangaroos on the side of the road. 15 ended up being the final tally.

We stayed the night at the Young Tourist Park. A number of pros and cons for this park (see below), but as we pulled in late and left around 10am, we didn’t really take advantage of too much except the showers and the laundry. We are trying to run our food stores down, so everyone almost ate something different tonight. The food issue was one of the main reasons for purchasing something like a caravan, camper or camper trailer. You are able to eat what you like, when you like and cater to individual’s tastes. This is always my major battle when staying elsewhere and relying on purchasing food for the kids. Let’s face it, there is only so many times that you can (or want to) live on McNuggets, pizza and the like. Sometimes you just hanker for a good ol’ snag! Anyway, this aspect has now been largely resolved for me as we are now able to carry our own food with us. In buying the van, I opted for less bench space in order to accommodate a larger fridge. And now that we have been away for a few weeks, I am so glad I did.

Caravan park wrap up: at the time of our visit, the Young Tourist Park seemed such an ironic name as the vast majority of people staying there were of the grey nomad brigade. Perhaps it should have been called the “Old Tourist Park”! Seriously, this park has also seen better days, and whilst it is clean, is very worn around the edges. The site we had was right next to the amenities which was fine, and it was well grassed. The distance between the vans was also reasonable and the way that most people had parked, meant you weren’t looking into anyone else’s van. We didn’t use the BBQs at all (used our own cooker), but Mark tells me that the water to wash up with was nice and hot (yes, don’t fall over...Mark has been doing the dishes the entire time we have been away. Hope it keeps up!). The big downfall of this park was the kiddy friendliness. The playground was, in one word, CRAP. There were only three pieces of equipment (2 springy seesaw thingys and a strange looking monkey bar), and one of the seesaws was broken and the monkey bars would be too high for a 8yo let alone for a 4yo and 21mth old. Unlike some of the other parks we had been in, there was no ability to bath or change the kids, unless they were in with you, which is rather a PITA quite frankly. But the owner was friendly and explained everything to us, and the park suited our needs of an overnighter well. If you have kids, I would advise to miss this park unless you are only stopping for the night. It may suit older generations though, depending on how friendly you want to be.


Day 11: Young to Albury

A fairly uneventful trip to Albury today. We stopped in at Gundagai to take the obligatory photo with the dog on the tuckerbox (although, Tom was convinced it was a wolf!). When we arrived in Albury we booked into the Albury All Seasons Tourist Park. The playground here is very well appointed with the kids playing on the equipment for about half an hour whilst Mark set up the van. Biddy overestimates her abilities in many things and going down big slides is no exception. She has no fear of heights and today took a tumble off a 6” slide. She spotted it first and got to it before Tom, so she had not seen anyone else go down it. Instead of sitting down at the top, she goes down the first part standing up and then face plants on the slide and bounces off into the chipbark at the bottom. I was ready for the scream and cry, but no, she got up, dusted herself off and got right back on it again. Tough kid.

We took the kids bowling as Tom enjoyed this so much when I took him at Christmastime. We just let Biddy have some of our goes, and embarrassingly, she did just as well (or better) than Mark and I! Mark won the first game, I won the second. Tom held his own very well, scoring in the 70’s both times.

Tonight we took the kids to the Commercial Club for dinner and we told Tom that it was a restaurant. So he was on his best behaviour and he really did try. Although he did pour salt all over his meal just after being told to leave the shaker alone. The clubs are a great place to take kids as usually under 5’s are free and all it cost us for them tonight was a glass of lemonade each. Plus, there is a huge choice of food (and desserts) for them and you can almost be guaranteed that they will eat something.

Tomorrow we are really heading south and will wind up at the Butler’s place (relatives) in Beaconsfield for a couple of nights before going home on Sunday.

Caravan park wrap up: this park is very nice. As mentioned before, the playground is very well appointed and set out. The pool is nice but was too cold for us to use this trip. The showers are smallish, but the water is hot and the pressure is good and this is the first park that we have visited that has a sunken area for the shower and a raised bit to get dried on. Saves getting your pants wet in the puddles of the shower, or having to put them on in the main toilet area for everyone to see! The ladies bathroom also had a baby bath (large trough) with plenty of room to lie baby down to dry and change. And as a nice touch, there were cloths hanging up for you to dry out the stainless steel sink when finished, and also a hairdryer supplied in the bathroom. The laundry was fine (2 washers, 1 dryer) and both a reasonable cost ($3 and $2 respectively). We haven’t used the camp kitchen yet, but will give it a workout tomorrow when we have bacon and eggs for breaky. The downsides are that the vans are a bit close especially in the drivethroughs and because of the configuration, you tend to end up looking into your neighbours van. The road noise is very noticeable, but this is on the Hume Hwy (Wagga Rd), so it is to be expected I guess. This park is also a little way out of the Albury CDB but there are plenty of eateries, shops, supermarkets etc on the main road not far from the park. The only other gripe is that there is a lot of gravel around, which makes for noisy walking and driving. But all in all, a very nice park and is good enough to spend any number of nights here to base yourself out of to visit the surrounds of Albury Wodonga.