Saturday - Cobar to Mudge

Saturday - The holiday that ended too fast Cobar to Mudgee

Resigning to the fact that to drag the little van up any more dirt roads seeking national parks was not fair on anyone – we had turned to home.

We left Cobar and travelled to Mudgee. I didn’t want to go home but I didn’t want Greg to be angry and the van to fall to pieces either so we didn’t have much choice. Didn’t mean I had to like it.

We arrived at Mudgee after a decent sized drive. I have always wanted to go to Mudgee. We found the tourist information centre and the helpful lady gave us some information including where the caravan park central to town was. We then booked in and set up. The van behaved, the fridge decided to work and we put on our hats (beanies as it was freezing) and went into town.

Mudgee on a Saturday night

We looked a bit rough for here – Mudgee gets a lot of people up from Sydney – who obviously haven‘t been camping for two weeks and have warm clothes that look nice.  Not a polar fleece to be seen. It didn’t matter as I carry a bit of makup in my handbag so when we selected the first place to have a drink at – I nicked into the loos to try and make myself look a bit more human.  Made up and still in camping clothes we tried a few more pubs around town. One looked like our ‘King O’Malleys’ in Canberra. The next one had more cheerful staff but didn’t look as good but I must say that they had the best Chardonnays as house wines ever.

Mudgee is famous for its Chardonnay. I was in luck. We decided to have dinner at a little café as I hadn’t prepared anything at home and Greg was getting cabin fever from being either in the car or the van. The meal was nice, I had duck for a change and Greg a steak (which he said was ok)Then we went home for a game of scrabble. Only because I took it along and we hadn’t played it yet. I won by a point.

The next day was Sunday. It was sunny but cool. I planned to go on a run so left Greg sleeping and started running about 7.45ish. I found a few points of interest and mapped out the town, even found a couple of pubs we’d missed from the night before’s check out. Then returned to camp to find Greg still asleep.

I didn’t want to disturb him so I got my stuff together for a shower.

The showers at the Riverside Caravan Park are old but well maintained but whoever installed the shower rose must have though that no female ever grew above 4 feet and 6 inches tall. The shower when convinced to be hot – only hit me in the middle of my chest. I am not the tallest woman either.

Obviously the people here realized this problem but rather than replumb the whole row, they have installed a hand rail. This meant that you could stand with your back against the shower while it was on, hang on to the rail and bob down to get your hair wet. Kind of like water ski practice. Now I have decent muscle tone in my legs and had just been for a run but even I found being in a half squat position to rinse my shampoo/conditioner a little work out. I bet there are older women that don’t exercise as much that would have had a whole month’s worth of exercise just in having a shower here.

It was the same in the toilets when I went to use them. I wondered whether I was trying to sit on a child’s toilet it was so low. Again they have installed a hand rail in case you don’t have enough quadriceps strength to haul your arse back off them. Considerate really.

Anyway after my shower exercise I went back to the caravan to find Greg fully functional and awake so energetically encouraged him to have his shower – not mentioning that the roses were so low and then we would purchase a paper and go find some breakfast.

Greg found the showers as interesting as I did.

Wandering down town, we found a great little café with very slow staff but great coffee. You almost had to crash tackle them to the ground to get them to take your food order – then it took for ever – but that didn’t matter as I had my laptop, Greg the paper and we were desperate to find somewhere hot to go to once we got home.

The original bar in a pub transported
the the Gulgong Museum

Sunday was also the day I forgot it wasn’t my husband’s birthday. I was all hugs and kisses wishing him a happy birthday and all the rest of it until we got the paper and realized it wasn’t until Tuesday. Holidays – you just loose track of time.

Breakfast over and none the wiser as to where we could go to after we arrived home, we made the best of the district. We ventured down to Gulgong which is a small old gold mining town not far away. Its the town on the original $10 note! Henry Lawson county and apparently the best museum. We paid our $10 each to the museum which covered a whole block and went exploring. They weren’t kidding – this museum had everything. If you ever expected to see something in a museum – this one had it. Fossils, precious stones, farm machinery, old photos, rooms set up like the old days including shops, banks, a pub, bedrooms. There were displays of old phones, electrical appliances, books, outfits and uniforms, you name it and it was there. The museum also had a lot of reading about the objects on informative displays. We didn’t realize the time but about 2 and a half hours later with our eyeballs a boggling from all the stuff we saw and read about – we were both buggered.

Never complain your
bedroom is too small!
Gulgong Museum

Time to visit a winery.

I drove back into Mudgee and found  winery. I didn’t want to visit the lot, just a few. The first one was High Valley. He had some lovely Chardonnay so I bought some. He also does cheese and feta cheese so we got some of that too. They were such lovely people and offered to store the van if we chose to go on without it, after I told them what happened. How nice and they had not even met us before! We didn’t take up his kind offer.

Next was a winery whose wines were the same as what you could buy in Dan Murphy’s and weren’t much chop compared to the ones we just tried. The only nice wine was around $40 which was way out of our budget. We did start talking to the lady about caravanning and her husband and her have just got back from a two month trip. Picked up some good tips and bought nothing!

The last one was the Mudgee Winery. We arrived when most wineries were starting to pack up. Greg was driving and not interested in tasting. Suited me. There was a young couple on a tour complete with a mini bus driver. The driver and mine started to have a chat. Apparently he has a van too – so they yacked about four wheel drive cars and vans etc. I tasted some of the wine. Eventually the young couple purchased what they wanted and rounded up their driver – still actively engaged in conversation with Greg, and left.

Vinyards at Mudgee

Greg then had nobody to talk to and was giving me the ‘hurry up’ body language. I had been talking to the chap serving and we mentioned that some of the Mudgee reds were not as gutsy as we were used to. He proceeded to disclaim us and produced some lovely reds that even Greg the non drinker today had a try. Then we got talking to this fellow about how he came to be running a winery he doesn’t own and several things including town gossip until the sun went down and it was time to close up. We bought a mixed case of wine at the top end of our budget, he gave us a discount which was very nice. It was a really nice way of ending the day.

Driving through the vineyards - they are considerate here
they put a porta loo on the side of the road
thankfully I didn't need to use it on this occasion !

We went back to camp and decided to go out to the local Thai called My Thai which was supposed to be really good. We walked there which was not far and really nice. The Thai was excellent and since we were the only ones in the restaurant, the owner came out to ask us how we liked our meals. I greeted her in Thai and won a friend.  She told us she does lots of take aways – which there had been a steady stream of phone calls and people coming and going collecting their meals. We talked for ages. She comes from Bangkok and has been living in Australia for so long etc etc. Her staff started to pack up and her daughter who is also the waitress came for a chat. It was time to close – we paid and went home for another round of world championship scrabble. Greg won by 3 points this time.

Tomorrow it was back to Canberra and although we had enjoyed our day – I still didn’t want to go home. I wondered whether I would have felt this way at the end of the holiday anyway – probably.