Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Go west young man!

The Princess Bride and I made a snap decision to venture out to Dubbo for a couple'a days to take the Potholes to the Western Plains Zoo....
We left in the wee hours at sunrise on a Monday and had a fairly good run out to Dubbo, stopping for morning tea at Dunedoo.
After luncheon we visited the Old Dubbo Gaol...Mick was fairly scared to walk through the cell buildings, but other than that we all enjoyed learning about the prison system of the early colonials.

We then ventured out to Traintasia, a little model railway hobby shop that has an impressive working model railway setup to look at. Jimmy D is train mad! and was very impressed!

On Tuesday we arrived at the gates at 9:05 am and made our way in for our first day at the zoo...
We elected to drive our car around the zoo, safari style, although one can ride a bike or hire an electric buggy...Most of the animals were out and about, despite the hot weather, which was adelight to all, and we managed to catch feeding time for a lot of them on the way around...

The best thing about this zoo, is it's designed so you can get uninterupted views of the animals in a more natural looking enclosure. We left the zoo after lunch and headed back to the caravan park so the "potholes" could have a swim, then had a rest before heading over to my Brothers place for a barbeque dinner with his family.

Wednesday was our biggest day, leaving early (6:20am) to be at the zoo for a guided early morning walk. This was recommended by John (my brother) and was well worthwhile as we went behind the scenes on the walk, guided by a zoo volunteer, who had heaps of stuff to talk to us about the animals etc on the way round!!...even hand fed the Giraffes!

The walk was topped off by a cooked breakfast at the zoo restaurant....and no, the captives are not on the menu!

After breaky we left the zoo, packed up at the caravan park and headed to Parkes to see "the Dish", well worth the effort to see, with a very nice visitor centre, and excellent cafe with fantastic blackberry jam scones....yum!..recommended!

We then proceeded home via Wellington and Gulgong, (the ten dollar note town), not that going that way really saved us any time but Michelle had never seen Gulgong and its really narrow streets....
In all a very educational few days, enjoyed by all....

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