We left Dubbo early heading to Trangie - we had booked in to do a tour of a cotton Gin there at 9am. It took us about an hour to drive out there and we met up with our guide at the Trangie caravan park. Our guide was Andrew - he ran the caravan park and had decided that he wanted to know more about the area and local businesses and chose to learn about cotton. He gave us a great talk about cotton - looks like Monsanato has it's talons in here as well. No one can sell any cotton without paying royalties to Monsanato. He showed us what cotton looks like when its growing
even had a cotton plant planted outside.
Then we all drove to the Gin and donned our beautiful orange vests.
The cotton is then put through a machine where they use high pressure air to separate out the seeds and all the other junk.
before it's packed into big bales of clean cotton
Unfortunately that's all we do with it these days - it's then shipped off to China
We finished our tour with a few samples to take home
Then headed out to Gilgandra. We stopped at Hunter Park for lunch.
Even Mum and Dad had fun.
Before leaving Gilgandra we had to find the visitors information center - we were on the worlds largest solar system drive. This drive technically starts at the sliding Springs observatory (which we will get to tomorrow) and is set at a scale of 38 million times smaller than the actual solar system. Each planet is at its relative location away from the sun and is scaled to size. We missed seeing Pluto in Dubbo so we wanted to start with Neptune.
Saturn
And Jupiter
The drive today took us from totally flat plains
to seeing the Warrumbungles on the horizon.
And closer.
After checking in and dropping al our stuff we headed into the national park for some Kangaroo spotting
A quick dinner at our motel.
Then we headed out to a smaller observatory to get a closer look at the stars. I was a bit disappointed as the telescopes were a bit smaller than I had expected, but once they trained the telescopes to Saturn and Jupiter and the moon we got some really good views. Mel was able to put her camera into the biggest telescope and get this photo of the ????
Day 23 - Fri 19th July 2019 - Warrunbungles
Today we were planning on exploring the Warrumbungles. It was a frosty morning - had to scrape the ice off the windscreen before we could head off to the Vistors center.
We spent some time browsing the displays and checking out the view from the main window. Not bad!
Eddie proved that he was no baby dinosaur - He's too small.
We mentioned that we wanted to do the split rock walk and the ladies behind the counter tried to talk us out of it saying it was too rough and steep - well that's why we chose it.
Grandma and Grandpa decided against joining us (and its a good thing as there is no way they would have made it) so they took a trip back into Coonabarrabran to fill the car up with petrol - the low fuel warning light came on just as we got there.
Meanwhile, Mel, Atti, Nick, Ernie, Eddie, Lexie, Josh and I start up the trail.
The first section was very steep. Lexie was really not enjoying the walk. In fact she was in tears by about half way up.
We took a couple of breaks in just the first section.
After about an hour of walking we found a cool cave/ledge to have morning tea on.
The path then confused us by going downhill around the back of the mountain. We thought we may not actually make it to the summit.
But Lexie soon got really scared and I don't blame her It was really quite terrifying - So Mel went on and Lexie and I headed back to the turn off.
The rest of the party made it all the way to the top of the mountain.
before heading back down.
We waited about 15 ming for them to return and then headed back down the mountain. It took a lot less time and effort than going up though it was just as hard on the legs. Grandma and Grandpa met us down the bottom of the trail and so did Nick - He had powered straight through and done the walk in 2 hours.
We all headed across the road to a picnic area for lunch. We head a great view back up the rock we just climbed.
We were able to go up to a viewing platform and see the telescope and we got to see the dome go around, but not much else.
And some great views back over the Warrumbungles.
Back to the motel and the kids played in the backyard.
Mel, Atti and Mum went back into Connabarrabran to get stuff for dinner then made fish fingers and Chicken Parmigiana for dinner. Bedknobs and Broomsticks was on TV so we watched that before bed.
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