Caravan Cruising

 3rd August 2025 The 378 km drive from Jugiong was relatively uneventful. The Everest continues to tow the Torus with ease and I am coming to grips with optimum speeds to manage fuel consumption. Packing up the van for departure was pretty quick given that we didn’t unhitch, we also took the opportunity to fill the water tanks whilst we were at Jugiong as this free camp amazingly has drinking water, a dump point and toilets. A great facility for those travelling up and down the Hume Hwy. Once again we stopped at Sutton Forest for an early lunch before moving on to Sydney. We have had some patches of light rain along the way and are not looking forward to the rain increasing as we get closer to Sydney. Sydney did not disappoint, as the rain steadily increased as we got closer, sometimes heavy enough to make visibility difficult. We arrived at our storage paddock at Ingleside at around 3 pm, and the rain was still coming down, sometimes heavy enough we sat in the car until it eased, ...

 2nd August 2025 The Lake  Talbot Holiday Park in Narrandera is probably the best park we have stayed in this trip. It was hard to fault anything there. Today we have a shorter cross country trip to Jugiong through a few small towns a great scenery. We had already decided that we would stop in Junee for our morning coffee, and The Junee Chocolate and Liquorice Factory seemed the perfect venue. On the site of a 5 story abandoned flour mill, a substantial liquorice and chocolate factory has been established with a large cafe and dining outlets included. We were ready for a cup of coffee when we arrived so headed for the cafe first before exploring the rest of the site. This a small cafe area with a much larger space further inside the complex Inside the operating factory the old building is the main feature On the way out, of course you need to pass through the store selling their products and we acquired some chocolate coated liquorice, a good combination of their two key produ...

 1st August 2025 Today’s drive is around 385 km which seems a good distance for us when towing. On the Hay  plains there are not a lot of opportunities to stop for a cup of coffee, so we decide we will stop earlier than normal and have our coffee break at Balranald where we could park in a backstreet and found a nice cafe in the Main Street. There was also an IGA nearby where we bought some meat to BBQ tonight. .From then onwards the drive is pretty boring, the highlight was looking for a roadside stop to pull over and make some lunch. We eventually found one about 100 km before Narrandera, and had a relaxing lunch in the van.  We arrived at the Lake Talbot Holiday Park in Narrandera at around 2.30 pm. It is a very impressive caravan park on the shore of LakeTalbot. We were guided to our site by a man in a golf buggy driving ahead of us and giving hand signals. There were a few tight turns and lining up for the drive through site was also tight, but his guidance was excel...