Travelog post for: KattieMill

Wow, today was a big day! We had to do some errands in Bathurst which included some mystery shopping and well, some other boring stuff... but we got to do some fun stuff, and I even got to see some interesting sights...

First thing we had to load up in the car, Sara decided to show myself and my mentor what Orange looks like, and the outskirts of Orange on the way to Bathurst. So lots of photos were taken of the road... this tells you how dry this area really is and how much we really need rain.




As you can see it's mostly dry, mostly farm land and quite a few hills... although it isn't too much...



Shortly out of Orange you see a very small town, what you see is what it is... literally... a one street town. If you look to both sides of the road you can see some strange looking objects sticking out of the ground. A bit of background information... Lucknow used to be called "Luckno" because people came here to mine gold, and after a long long time they found nothing - so hence why they named the town Luckno, the one day, someone came in and found some gold in the mines where people weren't looking before, so the town was renamed to Lucknow. Kind of funny, but they're abandoned mine shafts obviously as just a reminder to the past of the Central West.

Now back on the road to Bathurst...





...as you can see, as Australia is very known and famous for, eucalyptus trees, and red dirt... there is a lot of red dirt in Sara's area, and especially a bit farther East in a town called Dubbo (which is 6 hours drive from Sydney) and that's more "outback" like... very desolate, dry, and very HOT!



...finally... after 45 or so minutes we are now entering Bathurst... this is what the town looks like...





...not much... first stop was a few pet stores... we couldn't go in nor could photos be taken, but Sara and Daniel are looking for a little puppy to bring home and she's been showing us some of her options. The puppies she's thinking about are so cute! Then afterwards we did the mystery shop, of course we stayed in the car and took a bit of a nap because it wasn't that interesting for us toyvoyagers...

...but then the fun started... we stopped at a park called McCattie Park in the middle of Bathurst.... here we are in a really weird tree near the entrance of the park...



...and in the middle of the park was a huge duck pond...



there were lots of people were out feeding the ducks, and we had a close encounter, one of the ducks popped up looking for food. When they realised we weren't food they went back into the water.. we saw some pretty interesting ducks...



...some black swans, how weird is that? I guess they're native to Australia. Sara said she never saw any black swans before coming down the first time either, and she says she's never seen them besides in this exact park. Strange!




...next stop was this weird little abandoned fountain, it was kind of cool looking so we stopped for a little bit of shade... don't we look comfortable?...

...and last but not least in McCattie Park we got to stop and see a huge statue...





...this statue is to commemorate the discovery of the Bathurst Plains and "opening of the West" in 1813. This is a very interesting and well crafted statue if I do say so myself...

Next part of this trip was SO much fun, I couldn't even imagine I'd ever have this opportunity in my life... Sara took me out to the outskirts of Bathurst where it's common to see some wild life, and what did we see?...






...we didn't get too close, and because they were being so cautious we had to watch from a distance and Sara couldn't put us in the photos as we'd be a blur because of the zoom in distance that Sara had to do... as you can see in the photos the kangaroos are very curious of us... but yet, in some of the photos there's someone standing behind the kangaroos... not even noticing them standing there...

Sara says that sadly they're trying to build up that area of the grasslands between Bathurst and Blayney so the kangaroos might be in a bit of trouble! :-( I hope not! They were so awesome!

...and it fits well, on the way towards our next trip, we got to see this sign... how fitting...



...and now were going to visit Bathurst most famous area... Mount Panorama... it's a very famous race track within Australia and even in other countries it's displayed on TV every October... it's open to the public to drive on at anytime so we got a chance... so we got to first learn a bit about it...




...as you can see this is me posing in front of the sign, how exciting is this going to be?...




...and here's a bit of information about the track...

...and here we go... there's the starting gate..



...and here's what the track looks like as were traveling along it... it was so much fun!

















...as you can see it's a big track, and around half way through the speed was a bit much so we rocked around a little bit but it was so much fun! Some of those turns are crazy and it's amazing to think some of the people go around those corners at 200+ kilometers an hour... crazy!

...and this is the sign as your exiting the track... and back onto the road... time to go home! It's been a very busy day!



...on the way home it looked really stormy out so Sara got a nice photo of the sun coming through a really dark cloud... isn't this a pretty shot?



...well when we got home I pretty much crashed I was so tired... and the 8th is Sara's sons birthday so that's going to be fun! I'll update again soon! Talk soon!