Drove from Stuart Town to Coonabarabran via Dubbo after a lovely breakfast cooked on the BBQ right near our van. We stopped for lunch at a cafe called Press which was a lovely spot where Pippen could sit with us in the courtyard - great food & coffee too.
We stayed at the Getaway Tourist Park in Coonabarabran. We requested a spot up the back as far from the highway as possible. This was a good choice as the trucks would have been loud at the front...all night!
I went for a walk/run and made it to the golf course so I could check it out for tomorrow's first game of the roadtrip! I ran back via town and the local IGA liquor store where I picked up 2 bottles of wine and then had an arm workout as I ran the rest of the way back to the park (9km walk/run).
We had planned to visit the Siding Springs telescope, but that was tricky due to it being in a National Park (no dogs allowed). We got very lucky because we discovered that two young guys run an Astronomy session right in the Getaway park! They had a 10 inch telescope and spent an hour and a half educating and showing as the magic of the solar system. The moon, Saturn, and Alpha Centauri were highlights, but the real highlight was the passion and enthusiasm of the two guys! We loved learning that the night sky moves 15 degrees every hour, and if you hold up your hand with thumb and picky extended with your arm outstretched the distance from thumb to pinky is about 15 degrees. 15 degrees is also the distance between the top of the pointer and the bottom of the Southern Cross. We also learnt how our indigenous people used the stars to navigate and also how they knew when they could collect emu eggs!
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