Road trip oddities in regional Australia

And a delicious meal from a favoured cafe.

Hello! Happy Easter, if you celebrate and hope you had a splendid long, long weekend – if you were lucky enough to get it off.

I’m travelling at the moment, bouncing between family. So! Things are a little bit disjointed this fortnight.

I really just want to share a few thoughts from ‘the road’ and talk about some meals. So, that’s what we’re doing.

The beginning of a truly epic sunset.

The strange things you see while on the road in Australia

Due to having an interest in tourism and having spent many of my formative years in regional places, I find the measures country towns are taking to attract dollars quite interesting.

The town of Dunedoo is a great example. Being smack bang between the regional cities of Dubbo and Tamworth, it gets plenty of traffic coming through. Yet, the town has chosen to truly innovate when it comes to attracting attention.

Oh, towns are painting their silos? Dunedoo’s covered three sides of theirs. Sculpture parks are in? Check. Let’s whack a giant black swan on top of the local motel and add it to the unofficial register of Australia’s iconic ‘Big Things’. Dunedoo is pulling out all the stops, to get you to stop.

EXCEPT – 20 years ago the town voted against erecting a giant toilet (‘dunny’, Dunedoo, geddit?) in the town centre. This to me, seems like a real missed opportunity. People will stop for a giant dunny. They may not stop for a big swan. I hope Dunedoo still does all right and gets plenty of tourist dollars, but also perhaps one day they can revisit this idea (I put together an Instagram story highlights thingo about this, which you can still watch).

You can also find Neptune in Dunedoo. In NSW there’s a whole Solar System Drive, which as it turns out, is the world’s largest. It starts at Siding Spring Observatory in Warrambungle National Park – representing the sun – and stretches into the Hunter Valley.

The project came from a government grant in 2007, although apparently the funding ran out before it could be properly completed. So, you kinda have the planets situated willy nilly around the region and no idea when the next one is going to pop-up in front of you. There is a website printed on each billboard which may have once housed information, instructions or perhaps even a map; it’s now defunct.

Apparently there are 24 planets loitering around rest stops and towns in the regions, with five dedicated solar system paths ending at Dubbo, Birriwa, Tamworth, Bellata and Merriwa. So all in all, five proper routes you can take.

So I guess if you’re in the region and you have time on your hands, you can take a celestial journey through central NSW.

All the oddities of regional Australia aside, it’s nature that puts on the best show when you’re on the road.

A 14 hour long and quite boring drive along highways got interesting as soon as I turned onto a back road and two emus ran in front of me (far ahead enough to be admired from a distance, not in peril of getting knocked over by my car).

I got to save an echidna from a flattened future, managing to slow down in time to let it waddle across the road, lest the two cars behind me turn it into a pancake.

And then the sky put on a show.

Thunderclouds suspended in the sky. Lightning flickering across them as they turned pink, red, orange, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, as the day faded into night.

The best thing(s) I ate this fortnight

As the last post was primarily about rituals, it seems fitting to share a food-related one this week.

I’m lucky enough to spend a little bit of time every year in the coastal city of Newcastle, in NSW. The food scene here has certainly improved in terms of both quality and variety over the last decade or so.

There is however, a cafe I come back to every time I’m in town. It’s called Talulah and it’s been in Newcastle (specifically ‘The Junction’, a suburb near the coastline) for as long as I can remember.

Close up of deliciousness.

It’s my favourite cafe in Australia. I have quite simply, never had a bad meal there.

So, it was lovely to drop in quickly, order an iced chai on a particular warm autumn day, along with their teriyaki pork belly benedict - with poached eggs, horseradish hollandaise and togorashi granola on a charred brioche, with pickled cucumber on the side. Damn, I wish I could get my pickles to taste like that.

It’s consistently good. If you’re in the area, I recommend checking it out. Thank me later.

Also shout out to this massive burger I ate in the country NSW town of Nundle, which cost 12 bucks! I was full for like, five hours after.

We’ll wrap things up here, but next week I’m going to share my favourite lasagna recipes – the cooler weather is calling for it. And to further entice you, one calls for sheets of bread rather than pasta.

Thanks as always, for reading.

-Celine

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