#2: [07-Feb-07]

27-Dec-2001 -- “The Wilgas”, Mary’s Mount, NSW

Continued from 31ºS 151ºE.

From Tamworth, we took the Oxley Highway towards Gunnedah and Coonabarabran and took a right-hand turn at the road to Mary’s Mount just near a green telephone exchange building.

Following the pointer on the GPS, we wound up directly in-front of a farmhouse on a property called “The Wilgas”. I went in and spoke to the owner and explained the degree confluence project to him and advised him that a confluence point was about 900 metres behind his house.

Not only did the farmer give us permission to walk across his land to the confluence, he directed us to one of his farm tracks that we could drive on to get a bit closer. As it happened, we able to drive right up the confluence itself which made this one of the easiest confluences I’ve ever done.

This was our last confluence for the day, so after taking the obligatory photos, we headed off to Coonabarabran where we spent the night at the Castlereagh Village Holiday Units, which has some nice family bungalows with cooking facilities. Coonabarabran is roughly half-way between Melbourne and Brisbane along the most direct route and has dozens of motels to cater for people who break the journey there.

We were only about 80 kilometres from Coonabarabran so theoretically we should have made it in about an hour, but unfortunately we had another ill-fated attempted short-cut which burned about an hour before we eventually turned around and got back to the Oxley Highway exactly the same we way we came. I am slowly learning the lesson that it only takes about one short-cut in ten to not work to negate the benefits of nine successful short-cuts, so I’m going to try to be extremely selective of short-cuts I take in the future.

Continued at 32ºS 148ºE.