Day 21 Monday 29/5/2023, Narrabri, pleasant 2 – 20

A group of disabled kids are having riding lessons in the stables area today. Woody takes another walk into town, we pick him up and drive out to the CSIRO radio telescope array, 22 kms out of town. These 5 gargantuan dishes are each 22 metres in diameter and move along 3 kilometres of rail track. There’s another one located a few kilometres away. The official name is the Australian Telescope Compact Array. What do they do? Well, this is where it gets really interesting. though Woody, Elle and VeeWee would disagree. The array is one of the most advanced telescopes of its type, in the top 3 in the world, and produced the first 3D images of Jupiter’s rings. You can check it out at www.csiro.au. And we finally saw the first kangaroo of the trip.

We arrive back at camp to see a familiar caravan pulling in. It’s Vee from Grenfell. We sit chatting outside until almost frozen. The cockies are settling and the sky is pink. The sunsets here are a delight.

Dinner is certainly cooked inside tonight. Air fryer chicken schnitzel with microwaved corn and peas with a hearty ‘caravan mash’.

Cockies: Cockatoos.

Caravan Mash: Place potato and pumpkin in a freezer bag and microwave. When cooked add milk, butter and salt and pepper to the bag and either mash with a potato masher or just vigorously massage the bag until the mash is smooth. It may sound weird but when you are in a caravan and on power, but it’s too cold to be outside it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Note: With its clear skies and more sheep than humans, this region is astronomer heaven, there are many telescopes dotted about from the Siding Springs observatory in Coonabarabran to the radio telescope at Parkes which is famous for broadcasting the first moon landing.

Accom: $17.85