First thing this morning we went to have a look round the Australian Fossil and Mineral Museum in Bathurst.
The museum used to be an old primary school built in 1897 - the staff seemed to rave on about this though it didn't really interest us considering Dave's house is probably much older - Australians seem to milk everything they can from their not very old history, which can be quite boring sometimes. Anyway, onto the real history they have here - the fossils and minerals. The first section of the museum was dedicated to all th precious stones and minerals that can be found in Australias ground. There were huge pieces of impressive quartz. Loads of info on how they were formed that we skimmed through (we only had an hours parking so couldn't spend too much time 'learning'). The best bit of this section was a real diamond that was the size of a peanut. It wasn't cleaned or anything so didn't shine and sparkle like the ones at H Samuel. They wouldn't tell us how much it was worth either, perhaps they thought that we were going to come round and steal it later.
The other section was more interesting - this was the fossils area. There were loads of fossils of animals from millions of years ago that became extinct and lots of bugs and spiders that had been trapped in lava or rocks. Then, the main reason for coming to the museum - the full skeleton of a T- Rex! It was huge! We wouldn't have like to have been cave men running away from that monster!
After the museum we drove through the famous Blue Mountains towards Sydney. We didn't stop here as we had planned to come here with Ai and Andrew in a couple of days. Once in Sydney we drove past the suberb of Pendle Hill on our way to Newcastle. To stay with Jonas again.
Jonas seemed please to have us again, as we no doubt bored him senseless with all the tales of our trip!