29 Nov - 30 Nov Canberra to Hay

And we are off.

We have promised ourselves that we will try and keep the driving to a minimum on this holiday with no more than 2 or 3 hours maximum each day, and preferably no driving at all while lounging by the beach all week.But this is a road trip, and this is Australia so there will no doubt be a few occasions when more time behind the wheel is necessary and this first day was one of them.We drove the 512km or nearly 6 hours with stops to Hay in Western NSW.The reason that this was our first stop is that it is the birth place of Rae (yes she is definitely a country girl a heart) and also the home of her Grandma Dunbar with whom we could spend two nights.For those non-Australians who might read this, Hay is kinda in the middle of nowhere.Well Australians wouldn't call it that; but the last major town before arrival in Hay was well over 100km.

The trip up was uneventful other than a stop at the "dog on the tucker box" which is named after a famous Australian poem written about country life and the cattle droving lifestyle.We arrived in Hay in the late afternoon and greeted by the ever loveable Grandma Dunbar and quickly settled down to a nice dinner and a few games of Yahtzee (Chris wining two from three of course...).

The next day would be our only day available for "sightseeing" not that hay is a great tourist destination being the small country town that it is (3000 population), but it does have one award winning attraction and that is called the "Shear Outback" commemorating the exploits of Australia's sheep shearers.Not very interesting I hear you say - well you are wrong, it was a great interactive display full of information about the sheep and wool industry which really was the backbone of the Australian economy for so long.

Some interesting (and possibly useless) facts we picked up were that at one stage there were over 180 million sheep in Australia; but that has dropped a bit now due to the long drought.For example the Hay area had up to 3 million at one time, but now that is back to 150,000.

We also got to see their working shearing station and visit the live demonstration.Given we were the only ones visiting (it isn't school holidays yet) we had our own private tour and Billy the shearer showed us the ropes.He was even an Aussie rep at the World Sheep Shearing Championships.Told us some funny stories about the time it was held in Norway (yes you read that right) and they needed over 110 farmers to provide the 3000 sheep for the championships as they only had about 30 each!!!Or the fact that the Mexican sheep shearers were afraid of getting hurt so would tie up the legs of the sheep before shearing them meaning they could only do about 20 a day, while the Aussies could knock off over 400!!

Hay plains is also apparently the worlds second largest flat area in the world behind the Sahara Desert; and a great place to catch a sunset, so we headed out for a look and were not disappointed.Some photos are attached in the photo section of this blog.

All in all an all too brief stay; but we will see Grandma Dunbar again at Christmas time.

We thought we would leave you with some quick facts on our trip and update them now and then with different stats so here is a start;

Kilometres travelled so far: 594

Deadly animals encountered: 1 (brown snake)

Flies killed: 23 (at least)

Birds taken out by our speedy Subaru: 2 (unlucky parrots who flew into our path)