WEDNESDAY JULY 17    YOUNG

I was woken at 8am by the phone. Was friend H calling. We arranged to visit them at Wallendbeen on Sunday, and stay the night there. That means we should be getting home about Tuesday.

It was yet another chilly grey day, although mostly dry. I was finding the weather adversely impacting on my enthusiasm for travel!

John got up about 10am. After his breakfast, decided to have another fiddle with the gas bottles. He went off in the car to buy a new bottle, thinking the problem might relate to the empty out of date one, but couldn’t find a store that sold them.

After an early-ish lunch, set off for a little local area drive, detouring first via the dog exercise park.

Went out through what would have been the really early part of Young, along Whitemans Road, past Garibaldi Gully and the tourist fossicking area.

It was about 20kms to the village of Murringo, through really attractive rolling hill and valley country.

Young countryside

Murringo was a quaint settlement, with some lovely old stone buildings. The first settlement here was in 1827, so then it would have been outside the Limits of Location – the nineteen counties radiating out from Sydney, where settlement was legal.

All this area was fertile, well watered and attractive to the squatter pastoralists of the 1820’s and 30’s. It was north of the more settled “civilized” areas around Yass and Boorowa. The Lambing Flat that was the precursor to Young, was the site of sheepyards, shepherds’ huts for lambing ewes in the good creek valley. Thus it stayed until the gold discoveries of 1860. By 1861 it was clear the new gold fields were rich, and they soon extended over an area 20 miles by 10 miles. By 1861, there were some 20,000 miners, and about 3000 Chinese. In that year, the settlement was formally named and gazette, which meant that land could legally be bought and sold.

Turned NW, towards the Murringo Gap, travelling along a fertile looking valley that gradually narrowed, with the flanking hills becoming bigger. The Murringo Gap is a kind of pass through the sides of a rift valley formation that extends between Young and Cowra. Through the Gap, we took the unsealed Nine Mile Gap road that would take us back to the Olympic Way north of Young and thus we completed a circuit.

Through the Murringo Gap

Stopped at the Lions Lookout north of town – gave a panoramic outlook over the rolling farmlands.

Tea was pork fillet with sweet and sour sauce, from a jar. I sent John off to the camp kitchen to microwave a packet of rice.

I decided to shower, after tea. The en-suite could benefit from having a heater – brr.