Log One Hundred and Eighteen – Space The Final Frontier

6 July 2025

We are on the road yet again. The motivation this time is to escape a cold winter and to find a more compatible climate in the north. We are equipped with e-bikes but our focus remains on warmer days.

This is the first long adventure in the new car. This means a new challenge with getting the best out of the space available. It’s a game of Tetris as you rehearse how best to use the space in the back of the vehicle ensuring everything fits in a fashion that it’s readily accessible when needed. This process took a series of three cycles of packing and unpacking.

Success, the space available accommodates our stuff and the new toys. The chairs are in along with all the bike bits including batteries and the ramp to load the bikes on the rack. Space is such an undervalued commodity.

Space continues to grab our attention as we visit the Parkes radio telescope. This instruments looks deep into a different type of space, well beyond our earthly limitations. The Parkes dish looks at pulsars hundreds of thousands of light years away, that’s a lot of space.

After Parkes we visited the Siding Spring Observatory outside of Coonabarabran. More space stuff and this time there is a scale model of the solar system with models of the planets spread along the highways. It’s quite a surprise to drive half an hour to a whole hour before seeing the next planet. They sure are far apart in all that space.

We did discover that Siding Springs Observatory has something in common with the Louvre in Paris. What could that be you ask? It turns out they are both closed on Tuesdays. So don’t try to visit either destination on a Tuesday, you are wasting your time.

The Warrumbungle National Park incorporates the remnants of volcanos that were active for about 3 million years and became inactive about 13 million years ago, that’s a long time ago. Within the park Tara cave is a place that was occupied by indigenous people for about 4,000 years. They were using this cave prior to the building of the pyramids and were last seen in the area in about 1830. Rocks used as grinding stones are evidence of their occupation of the area.

On a completely different note and having spent many hours on the highways I have come to an understating about other drivers. I have realised that the relationships between the various users of the highway is best illustrated as the game of rock, scissors, paper.

Let me see if I get this right. Car drivers beat cyclists, motorcyclists beat car drivers, truck drivers beat caravans and everyone beats the guy driving at 10 kph under the speed limit. Motor cyclists beat cars, caravans and cyclists because they present no obstruction to their journey but trucks beat motor cyclists because you can’t see around them. No one is happy with everyone.

There was however a break down in this known state of normality. Over the UHF radio we enjoyed hearing a truck driver abuse another truck driver for down right dangerous driving. We had observed a semi trailer weaving between cars at high speed and were impressed when a truck driver called out this appalling driving on the public airwaves. Talk about a glitch in the matrix! I do make it a habit to call up the truck drivers when it is clear for them to pass. It’s all about trying to manage perceptions and natural biases about caravans but I think I have a lot of work to do.

We will be on the road for several weeks so hopefully there will be more opportunities to write about what is happening out there.

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