Good bye Jindabyne

We got up about 630, packed the bed and moped the floor. That was it we were officially finished in Jindabyne. We left the keys on the table and hopped in the car. We were on our way north.

First stop was in Cooma for petrol, last time I went it was almost 10 cents cheaper but not this time… oh well. We also stopped at the wrecking yard to try and buy a new antennae, someone snapped ours off in a parking lot. ☹
From here we drove north to Canberra, didn’t stop, we checked it out on our way through, not a bad city, and the government buildings are really nice, sorry I didn’t take a picture but I was sorta driving.

Next stop was Yass, we were planning on eating lunch in Cowra but both of us were really hungry. We stopped at the grocery store and picked up stuff to make sandwiches and went to the park for lunch. It had some awesome picnic tables, at least till I sat down and found out it was covered in water. My jeans were soaked, made the next part of the drive kinda uncomfortable.

From Yass its less than an hour up to Cowra. We checked out a couple of Op shops in Cowra, before heading to the Japanese Garden. Found some good buys at the shops. The garden is amazing and I did manage to take a few hundred photos. The cherry blossoms where in bloom so it was really pretty. It would have been interesting to be there next week for the cherry blossom festival Sakura Matsuri.
It is an interesting story, how the garden came to be in Cowra. In WWII there was a POW camp near Cowra, and there was a huge escape. 231 Japanese soldiers were killed and 3 Australians. The RSL(retired servicemen) took care of not only their graves but all the Japanese graves as well. When Japan found out about it they decided to support the building of the garden.

From Cowra it was still over a three hour drive to Mudgee where Grace’s brother lives. The roads after Bathurst were pretty bad, and then it was all winding roads up and over the mountains in the dark. I seen three Kangaroos near the road and only one tried to cross, and that was in front of the car ahead of me. We both had to slam on our brakes, its exactly like deer at home but I think the kangaroos might be a bit heavier. Glad I didn’t hit one. We got to Grace’s brothers about 730, it had been over 12 hours on the road, including our stops. I was pretty tired, but still managed to play one game of settlers before bed.

More later…