Hello, this thread will document my three week road trip with my family in my NP300 to Ayers Rock and Alice Springs. I'm travelling with an 8 week old, so this is a pure highway expedition - look elsewhere for 4WDing tales! That said, for overseas readers I hope I'll get some pics that interest you. I've just upgraded to a DJI Mavic Pro drone and look forward to getting some pics with it.
I'm writing this at the end of Day 2 from just outside Wilcannia NSW.
With the baby plus my 2.5yo we only really expect to be able to do 6 hours or so of actual driving per day. That translates to about 8.5 hours on the road with toilet breaks etc, and that's pretty much all the available daylight around here in July. That being said, as we progress west, we should get a touch more time in each day. This is important because we have arranged to meet family at Ayers Rock and must arrive on Friday.
So that means, despite weeks of careful preparation and packing, I was dismayed to not set off yesterday until nearly 1030, thanks to some spectacular last-minute tantrums and disorganisation. By the time we'd refuelled we weren't on the highway proper until 1100, and so we will spend the next few days making that up.
Accordingly pics will be a bit sparse for these first few days. Here's my boy at our lunch stop by the side of the Golden Highway (or first pic below depending on how you view the forum):
Our route took us away from the coast and across the Great Dividing Range watershed just east of Dunedoo. This area is broad acre mixed farming country, and earlier this year was surprised when a series of fast-moving grass fires ignited in wheat stubble and merged into the Sir Ivan fire. It burned for about six weeks and destroyed 136,000 acres of farmland, including 6,000km of fencing and untold scores of stock. Grass fires aren't usually this damaging and the farmers weren't very prepared. A charity organisation called BlazeAid is trying to get travellers to donate a day of their time to building fences. Dunedoo is their headquarters. I don't know how they'll go.
Like much of rural Australia, the fire fighting was almost entirely handled by volunteer brigades - farmers whose own properties were burning rallying to help their neighbours. In all the Rural Fire Service rotated over 15,000 volunteers through here (although many of this number would have been the same person returning for more than one shift). It brings a tear to the eye.
You can maybe see some scorched trees in the background of the shot of my lad on the trailer.
We spent the night in Dubbo in a commercial campground:
I was expecting cold weather on this trip, but in our messy departure I forgot the bag with the proper outdoor gear in it - a mistake, as I realised when I woke for my morning ****:
We had another late start scouring the camping stores of Dubbo for some rather inadequate cold weather gear before setting off. Dubbo marks the westward limit of conventional agriculture in NSW. Beyond this you enter what was once entirely sheep station country - huge, unimproved, unpastured stations of millions of acres in the semi-arid mallee scrub. Except as part of a soldier and migrant settlement program in the 1950s and 1960s, huge irrigation networks were dug from the Namoi, Darling, Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, so west of Dubbo you spend half a day transiting some of the most implausibly-located cotton fields you'll ever see before you get back into station country. The cotton harvest seems to be just winding up and all the silos are in full swing - this is the one at Nevertire. They seem to bundle it up and then pack it into shipping containers before loading it onto trains and trucks (excuse the dodgy panorama, I wanted to capture the scale without walking 1km away):
As the day wore on the soil gets redder and the crops give way to scrub. We passed the copper mining town of Cobar, which has some great relics of its mining heritage on the highway, but those photos appear to be MIA.
The Barrier Highway is mostly two lanes and 110km/h. We had a few close calls on the road with a mother emu leading her nine chicks across the highway; a wedge tailed eagle lifting off from a roadkill carcass with a full belly that barely cleared the roof; another emu that made a mad bolt from safety into danger across my bow; and some useless git driving a caravan 30 under the limit straddling the centreline, forcing me two wheels into the dirt to overtake.
We ended up stopping just outside Wilcannia, at a station property that allows you to camp on it. You stop in at the homestead and ask and they'll point you to somewhere out of the way. It's us and some road workers from RMS who have set up a rowdy camp for the next six weeks while they repair the bridges over the Darling River flood channels.
There are some damn good reasons not to stop in Wilcannia which I might go into later, but for now I'm parked up next to a billabong along with some serial-killer looking man in a ratty old Jeep, sleeping on his back seat. Another ute drove in slowly, stopped a ways off staring at me for 10 minutes, then drove off again really slowly. I wish I'd brought my rifle :/
The property runs on generator power and when they turned off at 9pm, the darkness is astounding. With the naked eye we can easily pick the Milky Way and millions of stars and with my 10x50 binoculars the fuzzy bands of light resolve themselves into trillions of stars. I've picked out Saturn and Jupiter, and with a telescope I could maybe see Pluto. Plenty of shooting stars but no satellites tonight.
With the generators off initially it seemed silent but in fact the world is full of noises. Most of them creepy. We're only about 1km as the crow flies from the highway, and at this time of night maybe one truck every half hour or so comes past. You can hear its tyres roaring on the bitumen like a jet engine for a full half minute before it passes, and then a whole minute as it fades away again. Kind of odd.
Tomorrow we aim to cross into South Australia where we change time zones, surrender all our fruit to a man at the border checkpoint, and begin to turn northwards.
I'm writing this at the end of Day 2 from just outside Wilcannia NSW.
With the baby plus my 2.5yo we only really expect to be able to do 6 hours or so of actual driving per day. That translates to about 8.5 hours on the road with toilet breaks etc, and that's pretty much all the available daylight around here in July. That being said, as we progress west, we should get a touch more time in each day. This is important because we have arranged to meet family at Ayers Rock and must arrive on Friday.
So that means, despite weeks of careful preparation and packing, I was dismayed to not set off yesterday until nearly 1030, thanks to some spectacular last-minute tantrums and disorganisation. By the time we'd refuelled we weren't on the highway proper until 1100, and so we will spend the next few days making that up.
Accordingly pics will be a bit sparse for these first few days. Here's my boy at our lunch stop by the side of the Golden Highway (or first pic below depending on how you view the forum):

Our route took us away from the coast and across the Great Dividing Range watershed just east of Dunedoo. This area is broad acre mixed farming country, and earlier this year was surprised when a series of fast-moving grass fires ignited in wheat stubble and merged into the Sir Ivan fire. It burned for about six weeks and destroyed 136,000 acres of farmland, including 6,000km of fencing and untold scores of stock. Grass fires aren't usually this damaging and the farmers weren't very prepared. A charity organisation called BlazeAid is trying to get travellers to donate a day of their time to building fences. Dunedoo is their headquarters. I don't know how they'll go.
Like much of rural Australia, the fire fighting was almost entirely handled by volunteer brigades - farmers whose own properties were burning rallying to help their neighbours. In all the Rural Fire Service rotated over 15,000 volunteers through here (although many of this number would have been the same person returning for more than one shift). It brings a tear to the eye.
You can maybe see some scorched trees in the background of the shot of my lad on the trailer.
We spent the night in Dubbo in a commercial campground:

I was expecting cold weather on this trip, but in our messy departure I forgot the bag with the proper outdoor gear in it - a mistake, as I realised when I woke for my morning ****:

We had another late start scouring the camping stores of Dubbo for some rather inadequate cold weather gear before setting off. Dubbo marks the westward limit of conventional agriculture in NSW. Beyond this you enter what was once entirely sheep station country - huge, unimproved, unpastured stations of millions of acres in the semi-arid mallee scrub. Except as part of a soldier and migrant settlement program in the 1950s and 1960s, huge irrigation networks were dug from the Namoi, Darling, Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, so west of Dubbo you spend half a day transiting some of the most implausibly-located cotton fields you'll ever see before you get back into station country. The cotton harvest seems to be just winding up and all the silos are in full swing - this is the one at Nevertire. They seem to bundle it up and then pack it into shipping containers before loading it onto trains and trucks (excuse the dodgy panorama, I wanted to capture the scale without walking 1km away):

As the day wore on the soil gets redder and the crops give way to scrub. We passed the copper mining town of Cobar, which has some great relics of its mining heritage on the highway, but those photos appear to be MIA.
The Barrier Highway is mostly two lanes and 110km/h. We had a few close calls on the road with a mother emu leading her nine chicks across the highway; a wedge tailed eagle lifting off from a roadkill carcass with a full belly that barely cleared the roof; another emu that made a mad bolt from safety into danger across my bow; and some useless git driving a caravan 30 under the limit straddling the centreline, forcing me two wheels into the dirt to overtake.

We ended up stopping just outside Wilcannia, at a station property that allows you to camp on it. You stop in at the homestead and ask and they'll point you to somewhere out of the way. It's us and some road workers from RMS who have set up a rowdy camp for the next six weeks while they repair the bridges over the Darling River flood channels.
There are some damn good reasons not to stop in Wilcannia which I might go into later, but for now I'm parked up next to a billabong along with some serial-killer looking man in a ratty old Jeep, sleeping on his back seat. Another ute drove in slowly, stopped a ways off staring at me for 10 minutes, then drove off again really slowly. I wish I'd brought my rifle :/
The property runs on generator power and when they turned off at 9pm, the darkness is astounding. With the naked eye we can easily pick the Milky Way and millions of stars and with my 10x50 binoculars the fuzzy bands of light resolve themselves into trillions of stars. I've picked out Saturn and Jupiter, and with a telescope I could maybe see Pluto. Plenty of shooting stars but no satellites tonight.

With the generators off initially it seemed silent but in fact the world is full of noises. Most of them creepy. We're only about 1km as the crow flies from the highway, and at this time of night maybe one truck every half hour or so comes past. You can hear its tyres roaring on the bitumen like a jet engine for a full half minute before it passes, and then a whole minute as it fades away again. Kind of odd.
Tomorrow we aim to cross into South Australia where we change time zones, surrender all our fruit to a man at the border checkpoint, and begin to turn northwards.