Mike Handes: Holiday

We went to the Temora Aviation Museum this morning. It’s a fantastic museum because all the planes actually fly. We weren’t there on a flying day, but the planes are in fantastic condition. We spoke to a volunteer for some time about the planes. They have one of the only flying spitfire’s in the Southern hemisphere and recently acquired a 2^nd spitfire. At the last flying day the Prime Minister attended to open a new runway – the federal government has given quite a substantial amount to the museum, it helps when the main benefactor has the surname Lowy!

Anyway, James Packer and a number of other distinguished guests were present, apparently 600 million dollars worth of executive jets were there that day, plus 7,000 visitors. On our visit there were probably 15 visitors so it was good to be there on a quiet day.

We stopped at a lake just outside Temora for lunch and Stephen had a play in the sand.

We drove onto Parkes where we had thought we would spend the night, but it looked like a bit of a dive, we got some information and then we visited the radio telescope made famous in the movie “The Dish”. It’s a very impressive piece of equipment and its well setup for visitors.
One of the cool things they have there is two small dishes (2m or so across) that are arranged vertically (the edge of each dish is touching the ground about 50m apart. By standing on a step and facing the dish you are facing the centre of the dish. The way the dishes are configured you can talk into a dish and your voice is clearly heard by a person standing in front of the other dish. In fact, you can whisper and the person 50m away can hear you clearly!
We decided to drive onto Dubbo – there is a Big4 caravan park in Dubbo and we are staying in a spa cabin – very nice.

Tonight we went out and got takeaway pizza for dinner and we all had a spa afterwards – very relaxing.
Tomorrow we check-in to the Dubbo Zoofari lodge, so no driving & we’re all really looking forward to our zoo trip.
Drove 335km.
Google Map

Mike Handes