On the road...

While not, like the old song, on the road to Mandalay, we are on the road to Brisbane!  The plan is to take about 4 days and hopefully see some interesting things along the way.  We successfully navigated out of Melbourne and started N-NE on the Hume Highway, the main route between Melbourne and Sydney.  The road was all 4-lane and mostly freeway until we left it for less travelled roads.  I say less travelled, but the Hume itself was not congested at all.  The only really negative thing about Aussie roads is that they are prone to isolated, very deep potholes in the middle of long stretches of very good road surface--one needs to be vigilant, but you can't help hitting a few and then crossing fingers when the thud is felt.  We took our first break in Albury, NSW, just across the border from Victoria.  The was a nice information office with quite a bit of literature about places on our path north (and it was nice and cool--temperature outside was in the low 30s C (approx 90 F).  The car, of course, has A/C.

1890's railway station in Albury, adjacent to the information office.

 We continued on the Hume to Gundagai, home of the famous Dog on a Tucker Box statue (based a story about a bullock driver in the mid 1800's).

Sending reetings to Erin and Wm, who saw the dog on the tucker box on their Australia trip several years ago.

From there, we cut over to Cootamundra, where the plan was to overnight.  However, as the saying goes, there was no more room in the inn, so we headed along the Olympic Hwy to Young, about about 50 km to the NE.  Amazingly, all the hotels there were 80% vacant, so rooms were easy to find.  By that time (Sunday at 8:30) most restaurants were closed, but we found a pizza place run by what sounded like recently immigrated Italians and had a very good pizza.
On Monday, we headed almost due North, but via a meandering path of back roads, with the goal of joining the Newell Hwy (the principle inland Melbourne-Brisbane route) at Forbes.  We passed through very nice, but generally quite sparsely populated country (like most travel in Australia's interior), much of which is reminiscent of Northern CA in the summer.

Typical view along much of the first 700-800 km heading north--golden (brown) grass with interspersed green trees:  live oaks in CA, eucalyptus in Australia.  Percentage of plain versus mountain varied as we travelled.

We stopped a while to explore in Forbes, then headed NE on the Newell to Parkes (the Elvis capital of Australia--we just missed the annual Elvis festival by a day) for a picnic lunch, stopped to see "the Dish" radio telescope a few km off the highway, paused in Peak Hill for an interesting display about gold mining (principally open-pit in the 1990s, but also some relics related to underground mining on the same site in the 1890s) finally ending our day in Dubbo, where we enjoyed a nice Thai dinner.

Elvis in the Parkes visitor center.  When Elvis left the building, Parkes is where he went!  Elvis is everywhere in town:  on clocks, souvenirs, taxies, there is a Graceland Motel, ...  They even run a special, chartered train from Sydney for the Elvis Festival!

Susan at "The Dish."  It is famous in Australia in part due to its "role" in a film entitled "The Dish."  It's the (mostly) true story of the dish's role in receiving images from the first moon walk back in 1969.

Open-pit gold mine in Peak Hill.  It's on the site of mine from the 1890 that was exhausted using the technology of the day.  In the 1990', they applied modern methods and extracted another $500 million dollars in gold over the span of about 5 years.