To Canberra and back - Part1

So, the plan this year was to drive down to Canberra during the Christmas - New Year break.  I haven't driving along the inland Newell highway for more than 20 years, but I used to like the drive through some vast open country.  Could do with more geography along parts of it, but no route is perfect.

I used Google maps for directions, which take you through Warwick:

and I've just realised now that if you use Bing maps (or Yahoo maps - neither of these I realised existed til this morning) they take you via Toowoomba, and shows the distance as 692.6 km instead of 699km.  Who makes these decisions, and why did Google Maps make me travel 6.4 km extra?   I am also not so keen on how you have to zoom in very close on the Google Map before you can see the names of all the towns you are going to be travelling through.   The Bing version looks better in that regard.

(And by the way, I have never used GPS and still am fond of old folding paper maps.  This is the first trip where I have used on line maps, and it did prove a bit problematic at one point.)




Anyhow, here's the roughly equivalent Bing map:

So, we left Brisbane on Boxing Day at 9.30, and headed out through Warwick and out through Inglewood to the border town of Goondiwindi.

Inglewood is bigger than I remembered, and I was vaguely aware from farmer's markets in Brisbane that they grow olives out that way.  In fact, I was very surprised at the huge size of one particular olive orchard on your left as you drive west.   It seems to go on forever, and I see from a tourist guide that they are indeed taking olive cultivation very, very seriously:

 Inglewood intends to be the Olive Capital of Australia with some 350,000 olive trees planted; a major olive oil processing plant has been established in Inglewood and this is expected to become the largest in the Southern Hemisphere; with a unique olive themed centre, featuring many olive products and olive businesses and an annual Olive Festival in the olive harvest season, between March and May.

Well, I think we'll have to go back there during olive festival.

The drive from Inglewood to Goondiwindi is the start of the long, flat and pretty dull stretches on the Newell.  But the traffic was light, and we were soon enough at the border town, which now (like most towns along the Newell now) has a McDonald's.  A recurring theme of this trip was going to the golden arches to at least get coffee for me and my wife.  The Goondiwindi staff seemed particularly glum, for some reason.  In fact, rural McDonald's staff never seemed very happy to me this trip.  Perhaps because they were working during the holidays?

Off  down the road, finally heading south, through Moree (a town with lots of shuttered shopfronts, which is usually a sign of an unhappy local aboriginal population in New South Wales country towns.)  Then down to Narrabri.

It was this stretch that I first learnt the fun of cruise control.  Yes, my Toyota Camry has really only ever done short, coastal holiday trips before this, and I had never bothered to learn how to turn on cruise control.  With my wife reading out instructions, I soon learnt how good it can be on long flat stretches, and for this purpose, the Newell is perfect.  I wonder if it is the most cruise control friendly highway in Australia.

I like the way you can learn that the car in front of you is also using it, as you can maintain pretty exact separation for tens of kilometres if you are lucky. 

At Narrabri, a fairly non-descript town, I think we stopped again at a McD for coffee, because my notes indicate the staff were again glum.

The drive from there to Coonabarabran is through a lot of forest reserve, and you do get a bit of up and down.  Scores of dead 'roos too - in some stretches, it seemed lucky to go 200 m without seeing one.

Finally (it is easily an 8 hour trip, with breaks) it was into Coonabarabran.  This is the nicest town on the Newell so far.   And the reason we are staying there (apart from it being about the comfortable limit for one day's driving) is  this:

Well, not really.  That's the remarkably authentic 70's era tiling in the shower in the motel we stayed in.

(And before I continue, for those interested in the fast food details of the Newell Highway towns, Coonabarabran does not feature a McDonald's, but does have Dominos pizza and very large Subway.)

No, the best reason for going to Coonabarabran is because it's the "astronomy capital of Australia."

More on that in Part 2.