Bright?????

Day four.....!!

We had a an interesting night in Bright. Our motel room was infested with crickets!! Ray was quite a sight catching them and throwing them out the door in nothing but his nickers!! Eventually we stunned them with fly spray and got to go to sleep without any jumping on us.

I want to start with a couple of questions today.

Can anyone tell me why the alpine areas of both NSW and Victoria have a large number of dead trees? There is plenty of new undergrowth and small trees, but all the large trees are dead. When we were in the Kosciosko area we concluded that a fire had been through, although there were no new shoots on any of the higher branches. We began to think differently near Mt Hotham as the dead trees were not blackened at all...... ??

Question number two formulated itself in my mind quite early this morning, but I kind of already have the answer..... My friend Jan is always pointing out black cockatoos flying overhead. Her theory is that the number of black cockatoos predicts the number of days of rain. When we left Bright this morning the sun was peeking through (photograph below), shortly after a period of jubilation we saw a large flock of white cockatoos fly over. The question was - if black cockatoos flying over predict rain days, do white ones predict sunny days. Sadly the question was answered in the negative very soon after.

Where we had been.....................

Where we were going.................

Even though there was some sun as we left Bright we didn't go far before it began to rain again. Again I'm sure there was some spectacular scenery, but we couldn't see most of it.

We stopped for morning tea at Omeo, a charming little town with a history dating from the gold rush days. Although very small there was some interesting architecture. It was as though there was two distinct time frames in the town.....


1930's

More 1930's Very 'art deco'

Gold rush/Colonial

One of the few occasions when it was clear enough to take a photo.................

We did see some of the expected alpine wildflowers, but not in quite the way I had expected. I thought that I would be wandering around amongst them taking copious photos and uttering appropriate oohs and aahs. As it turns out I just pointed from the moving car, squinted through the fog and rain and sighed a lot! There were white (at least two different ones), yellow, mauve, pink and deep purple (no - it wasn't Patterson's Curse).

We decided to head to Lakes Entrance and were blessed with some more sunshine and a delicious meal of fish and chips overlooking the water

We stopped off on our way out of town at a lookout over the estuary

We ended the day in Sale. So far we have done 1,677km at an average speed of 87km/hr.