Day 11: Parkes > Forbes > Condobolin > Bogan Gate > Parkes

We experienced something this morning that we have not yet experienced on our trip so far. Blue skies … smiling at me.

A beautiful, clear, sunny Sunday morning in Parkes. Cold, very cold – about 5 degrees – but clear blue skies.

I’ve promised MBW that I’m not going to prattle on about the toilet game any longer, because it is not fair on those of you following along when you can’t play at home. So I promise that this will be the last time.

We had a bit of a conundrum last night. I went to use the toilet last night when I was ready to go to sleep and the light was on. I had a brief discussion with MBW and she assured me that the light was still off after she used it last.

The rules of the game don’t consider this situation – the rules say that the winner is the person who was using it when the light comes on. Houston, we have a problem.

Anyhow, because I found the light on I was declared the winner.

Now there is another problem. When the light comes on just as you are going to bed, it means (in theory, anyway) that you cannot use the loo again until after the cassette is emptied, so you end up lying awake half the night worrying about what will happen if you need to go urgently in the middle of the night.

Which, inevitably, you do. Need to go urgently in the middle of the night that is.

So I drifted off to the land of nod, only to be kicked awake twice for (allegedly) snoring. I then woke in the middle of the night and my bladder was sending urgent messages to my brain, and by the time I found my glasses and found the clock, I discovered it was only 1.00am.

That’s a very long time to hang on.

Bugger. So I had to get up, put on some warm clothes, and stagger over to the amenities block … to then learn that MBW had just gone ahead and used the toilet anyway, despite the “no vacancy” light flashing.

Long story short, this morning after breakfast, I claimed my prize and went to empty the cassette.

The caravan park we are staying in is a quirky little place. It is mostly on-site vans and cabins. As far as I can see it only has room for 2, maybe 3 travelling caravans.

It is called the ”Overnighter Caravan Park”, and we have obviously broken the rules by staying for two nights.

I know that I have digressed from the fascinating toilet light game story to telling you about the caravan park, but I need to digress again for a moment … sorry.

In the pictures above, you will notice that the slab and the wheel tracks for our site are back to front. Any normal caravan site should have the van parked on the wheel tracks on the left (as you stand at the front of the van looking at it) and the awning opens out over the slab. Ours is the other way around, which means that the area under the slab is muddy.

Peter – the guy who runs the park – didn’t understand the problem when we pointed it out – which is a real concern 🙁 But it hasn’t stopped us from enjoying ourselves here at the park anyway, and if that is the biggest problem that we have here in Parkes, it hasn’t been a bad place to stay.

Back to my story.

Not only is this a quirky park, but it also doesn’t have a dump point effluent recycling station, meaning that I needed to go in search of one. I found out that there is a council one about 1.2km away from here.

Just as a side note, if I die unexpectedly and you are looking at my browser history on my phone and you see that I have been looking for “dump point near me”, don’t worry because I’m not weird. It was necessary.

So I loaded the cassette up into the back of Elsie, and off I went. MBW offered to stay at the van and do the breakfast dishes while I was gone.

I was driving very slowly and carefully as I particularly wanted to ensure that there was no leakage or spillage in the back of Elsie. On the way to the dump point effluent recycling station I saw a road sign that said “Please Drive Carefully”. Believe me, I was!

Then I started to worry about what would happen if I was rear-ended by a truck, and that thought was just too horrible to consider.

I decided to take a very circuitous route to the dump point effluent recycling station, just to throw off anyone who may be have been following me. I actually felt like I was off to do some kind of illegal drug deal, or something.

Anyway I found the location I was looking for, did the deed, and then stood around chatting with some like-minded effluent recyclers as we chatted about the weather and our next destinations … like it is a perfectly normal thing to do.

So that was the morning.

Back to Percy, loaded Elsie and we headed off to Forbes.

For those of you who have seen “The Dish”, a number of the scenes were shot in Forbes rather than Parkes, because the buildings are more authentic for that era. There is a website you can use to do a self-guided tour of Forbes and find many of the buildings used in the movie.

Here are some of them.

It was still cold and we needed a hot caffeinated beverage, so we found a cafe – a real one this time – and had coffee and banana bread.

They are all a bit arty-farty in Forbes, with a number of sculptures around town. Some of them are … unusual.

In the one above – if you look really closely – you may notice that the 3 “people” in the sculpture are all anatomically correct, except …. they have the heads of dogs or rabbits. Sorry that photo is a bit crooked BTW – I felt a bit dirty crouching down to take a photo of it and was worried that if the police came along they might have a few questions …

We needed to figure out what to do next.

Option 1: We could head back to Parkes by the direct route and do some domestic chores. Boring!

Option 2: We could head back to Parkes the long way via Condobolin and Bogan Gate. That sounded much more interesting.

MBW wanted to look at a goanna sculpture on the way out of town, so we found it and went for a look.

We then learned that there are a number of other sculptures on the road to Condobolin, so we went investigating. This is what we found …

We also saw some very pretty countryside that we made a feeble attempt to capture.

No I have to be completely honest with you – each one of those sculptures had a note from the creator explaining the thought process that went behind each of them. Things like “recognising our precious resources and how we have to be more sensitive to our world around us so that there are beautiful things still in existence for our children”.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I just have trouble understanding how a girl standing on a cow playing a violin can be interpreted to mean all of that.

We arrived in Condobolin for a late lunch, and saw the last (or first, depending which way you travelled) of the sculptures – this one a series called “Utes in a paddock”.

Now THAT is something that I can understand with my tiny brain!

Time for lunch, so we did a quick drive-through of Condobolin to see the sights.

Condobolin is a typical small country town. Sunday afternoon and everything is closed. You could fire a cannon down the main street and not risk hitting anyone.

MBW used the public toilets in the centre of Condobolin and rated them as “very clean and they smelled nice”. Thumbs up Condobolin! If you are in mid-NSW and need a loo, MBW can recommend Condobolin.

We stopped on the other side of Condobolin for one of our – now famous – tailgate lunches in the shadow of some silos.

When I say “on the other side of Condobolin”, I mean another couple of hundred metres down the road.

From there, it was a straight run back to Parkes. And when I say “a straight run” I’m really not kidding. Pretty much a dead straight road with the usual bumps, potholes, and poor surface that we have been experiencing on many of the NSW back roads.

The only thing of interest on the way home was a small township called Bogan Gate with a population of 200. I’m not sure what the correct name is for people who live Bogan Gate, but I have a working assumption that they are Bogans.

If you have any information that suggests that is incorrect, please let me know.

We weren’t sure how many real live Bogans we would see out and about on a Sunday afternoon, but we saw three of them. That means that there are another 197 Bogans hiding in their homes somewhere, I guess?

Home to Parkes and a quick walk around the town centre.

Parkes has an Elvis thing going on that I don’t quite understand. Their sister city is something like Coventry in the UK, but they have a great deal of Elvis and Memphis stuff happening.

Home to do a few domestic chores, and I went out to fill Elsie ready for the trip tomorrow. We are heading north from Parkes towards a place called Coonamble, and we plan to stop on a working farm a bit north of there.

I can no longer deny the fact that we are heading towards home now, but it’s been fun and I’m ready to go home and cuddle my grandchildren again.

A big looping lazy circle today, with a total of 247km.

See you again tomorrow.

Ciao

#RoadTripNSW2022

#HeadingHomeNow