July 6

Started the day off a bit slowly – went looking for square-head Allen keys. One of the screws in the awning worked it’s way loose – I’m not even sure if such an item exists – Mitre 10 certainly didn’t have any. We managed to improvise by using a normal screw-driver and I think it will hold.

After seeing an ad in a local magazine we decided to visit the Village Bakery for morning tea – coffee and an apple pie with fresh cream (which we shared!). The Bakery has won national awards for pie-making in 2003 – 2005 so we thought it was worth investigating. It was a good decision! Another outstanding local attraction with a roaring fire to keep the cold at bay, not to mention lots of other delicacies and subs to make Subway green with envy.

Another visit to the Zoo, this time for only 3 hours, allowed us to get photos of some of the animals which were a little uncooperative yesterday. We also timed our visit to catch the African elephants’ keeper talk – it was thoroughly interesting and entertaining as the elephants used their skills to manoeuvre some large objects around. More photos of monkeys and lemurs were added to yesterdays’ collection. Between us we have about 800 photos from the zoo. Anyone for a slide night!

After a late lunch we headed in to town so Helen could have a swim at the RSL Club, only to find that it had closed at 1.00 pm.

We’ve been quite impressed with Dubbo. Although we’ve been through here many times and visited a couple of times for softball, we’ve never really had a good look around. The shopping centre is excellent and there are lots of playing fields, although they are suffering quite a bit from the drought.

We head off to Bourke tomorrow and with the forecast predicting rain I’ve got my fingers crossed we get on the road before it starts. Wet weather might be a bit of a handicap in Bourke especially as our day at Gundabooka National Park involves a fair bit of dirt road travel.