We both woke feeling much better in ourselves and figured we were just travel tired and having the 3 nights in a caravan park enabled us to catch up on things and generally relax so all good.
After packing up we headed off on the road towards Canberra although our plan was to spend a free night at a reserve in the small village of Gunning that sits beside the main highway (2 lanes each way) that runs between Melbourne and Sydney. We have decided not to go to Sydney at this stage as we will cover off the coast from Melbourne to Brisbane on our return which is some months away yet.
Our travel there was uneventful although one thing we started noticing is the number of quite large lizards that are on the road – just sitting there sunning themselves. We have not seen any that have been physically run over so have to assume people make an effort to avoid them. We very rarely see any kangaroo road kill now but there is a wider selection of other things such as foxes, possums and other small furry things splattered here and there so instead of “I Spy” we tend to play “Yuk - what do you think that was?”
Gunning is a very old time village in the heart of sheep country with many of its buildings classed as heritage. Actually people we spoke to said that the whole town was marked as such due to the number of really old historic buildings that exist. Many of them have a plaque describing when it was constructed and original purpose etc so is quite interesting.
The reserve where we stayed the night is excellent and one of the best spots we have been. It is a very small area right next to a pond area that has very clean water in it and within which there is quite a variety of water birds and of special interest are a couple of moorhens which have 2 chicks each. They fuss over feeding the chicks all day long by diving to the bottom of the pond and retrieving some sort of weed. They are also constructing nests on the water at the edge of the reed beds and are very particular about how each stem they add is fitted. We also saw what we think was a water rat that had caught a fish at least as big as it was (about 300mm long) and then all hell broke out as the moorhens attacked it fearing it would attack their chicks. Nothing like some drama – a “soap” on the water if you like…
While there Ross heard back from Paramount Caravans about our dicky battery. We have established with the supplier to take the battery to a place in Queanbeyan (down by Canberra) to be tested and hopefully replaced under warranty.
