A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
Reliving a childhood road trip to Dubbo
MEMORIES OF LONG CAR TRIPS are the stuff of family folklore. As the daughter of a country school teacher, international travel was never an affordable option for my family. Instead, come holiday time my parents would pack me and my four siblings into the car and hit the road, heading to some faraway tourist destination with countless other holidaymakers. The way I remember it, the journeys were always long and hot, but nostalgia is a powerful driver. Which is why, 30 years later, I decide to set off with my own three children to recreate a road trip from my own childhood to Dubbo, with its fabled zoo (in those days known as Western Plains Zoo, now officially Taronga Western Plains Zoo), and Parkes, home to the mammoth radio telescope. In the 1980s, Dubbo – which sits some 400 kilometres west of Sydney in central west New South Wales, in the heart of the Great Western Plains – was still something of an outpost. The Great Western Highway from Penrith was largely single lane, as was the Hume Highway. Today it is a regional super city, servicing a population across the region of some 120,000 people.
ON THE ROAD
Determined to recreate the feel of road trips past, I decide that the journey will be spent looking up, not down, which means no screens. This proves a challenge at first, but by the time we are heading past Goulburn and into the vast Southern Tablelands, I almost have my