The Executive Suite

Liz rang the Visitor Centre prior to us reaching Dungog, where we were advised to stay at the Showgrounds rather than the caravan park as the floods the week before had inundated the caravan park and it was still very wet. This was reinforced when we reached the town and stopped at the servo to pick up a new gas bottle, with the local paper having a series of pictures of the floodwaters.

In many ways it was nice to be back at a showgrounds, with plenty of space for the kids to wander and explore. I think we were probably better off there even if the caravan park was operational from what we gleaned in our time there. We ended up parked up on a hill that we found was nicknamed the ‘Executive Suite’ later as it was considered the absolute pick of spots to camp. Given there was the capacity to park in about 50 places there it obviously had something to attract people as it was easily our first choice (we were working on our own impressions as we didn’t see anybody until the next morning and just found our way around the facilities provided in the meantime.

The weather was absolutely beautiful for the couple of days we were there, giving us the sense that we were actually starting to move North. I am not convinced that all the cold is behind us but hopefully what we get from hereon in will be more of an aberration, rather than a constant.

Dungog was an extremely picturesque area as well as a friendly and pleasant town. I was surprised to find that the oval at the showgrounds had had the cricket pitch removed in the previous couple of years as the town itself seems quite large against many we have seen and should have easily supported a couple of teams. I can only guess that there is another recreation oval somewhere and this was a spill-over, although we never another oval in town and I would think it would be difficult to find a more attractive venue for cricket, with a quaint grandstand looking over a fully fenced oval. It reminded me of a couple of towns we visited in Victoria which had basic services closing down even though they were significantly larger than towns in Western Australia that support the same services and I started wondering whether the towns in WA are actually the anomalies due to the much more significant distances between places there.

The flood the area had received the week before started me thinking about the country we have traversed in the last month and a bit. Liz and I have discussed a few times that our impressions of many parts of Victoria and New South Wales are probably skewed due to the rainfall that has occurred recently. It has been impossible to identify the areas that we know are coming out of 10 years of drought without asking around, as everything looks lush and moist. The previous 10 years may also have something to do with the reducing services in some areas I guess – but it is hard to be certain of this given the fleeting view we actually get of many of the towns. It was interesting however how many of the businesses in Dungog appeared to be on the market.