Breakfast at the Dish

Monday morning was perfect .. the temperature when we left the motel was about 28 or 29ºC perfect!

We decided to head back up the road a bit to The Dish which we visited in June last year, I posted a whole heap of pics of it in this post so I didn't  bother taking many this time. I did want to try out the Gopro on it, I thought I might get some good footage of the road leading to the centre with the dish looming closer or maybe something cool like that. I set it all up so that all I had to do was press the on button while I was riding along and when I got my first glimpse of the Dish in the distance I managed to let go of the throttle long enough to reach up to my helmet and quickly hit the button without losing either speed or balance. I was pretty proud of myself for that accomplishment but a tiny voice in the back of my mind did mention that the button takes a bit of effort to press in ... did I press it properly? Ahh well I'd find out when I get there.

I pulled up to the dish and got all my gear off and pressed the off button (which is the same as the on button, you realise) before I looked at the Gopro. Now a while back Chillertek over at Road to Nowhere put out a bit of a challenge ....  show us your Gopro fails. I read that challenge and loved it but I wasn't really keen to share my fails at this stage .. hence turning off the Gopro before I looked at it, I wasn't keen to show my helmet hair off in classic fish eye lens style. So when I looked at the video when I got home I decided not to share my first real Gopro fail .. you can actually see where I realised that the silly thing had just been turned on >.<

We had a nice breakfast at the Dish Cafe, and some good coffee before heading back out onto the road. There's a neat little area along the road that is for pulling over and getting photos of the dish from a distance,  we'd taken shots there when we came here last winter. Those shots were awesome, the fields around us had been just starting to sprout their winter crops so there were green fields and blue skies with big puffy white clouds. This time it's the middle of summer, you would think that those crops would be doing awesome right, wrong .. they aren't there now, harvest was a couple of weeks ago. This has been one of the hottest summers in history all across Australia, and the photo I took that day shows it.

The Dish in January

The Dish last June

And all the while that I was taking pics of Terry and the Dish my trusty Gopro was busy taking photos of me taking photos .. oops I forgot to turn it off while we stopped, actually I'd forgotten that it was turned on.

We jumped back on the bikes and headed on our way ...

When we turned back onto the highway and Terry said 'ya wanna grab some cherries from this roadside stall?' and I said 'absolutely!' I still didn't realise that the Gopro was on.

I wondered why the guy was giving me some odd looks, but just figured it was cause he was wondering if the chick with the helmet on was gonna roll him for his millions. I bought my cherries with the helmet on cause I just couldn't be bothered taking it off for the ten seconds it would take me to get those cherries.

It wasn't until I got home and looked at these pictures that I realised he had been confronted not only with a chick with a helmet on buying his cherries, but also with a chick with a helmet on that had a little box with a flashing light pointed at him .. buying his cherries.

After stowing the cherries delicately in the top pack, we headed on our way again. It wasn't too much further up the road that Terry was confronted with his own strange and unusual sight. In the middle of the road in front of him was a bird picking at something tasty, he really didn't want to move and left it til the last possible moment to take off just in front of Terry. Boy was I hoping that the Gopro had caught that one!

It caught him just before he left the frame, I still like this shot anyway :) We got home and looked it up in the bird identification book that I'd got for Christmas, we think it was a Brown Falcon.

Photo from Wikipedia

It's hard to identify birds from a motorbike, but we try :-D

Not much else happened on the way home, we struck a bit more traffic, a lot of caravans and I got to test out my overtaking skills again, I'm getting better now that I've worked out how to plan for it. It was a lovely ride home, no pressure and the weather was almost perfect for riding. We haven't been for a ride since then, it's just been way too hot, but temperatures are cooling down a touch now and every time I pull the car in next to Roxy the urge is strong to just jump on her for a quick ride. Terry said he was tempted this afternoon too. This weekend is going to have to include a ride I think!

Parkes Loves Other Old Stuff Too

Sunday saw us heading a block up the road to the Henry Parkes Centre which is the Tourist Information Centre as well as three museums, Elvis, cars, and farm machinery. What a fascinating sounding place but I didn't think it would take us long to check it out, didn't look big from the outside. It killed half the day :-D

First of all there was the tourist centre, lots of touristy stuff to buy there and I was all determined to go back when we were finished to buy something ... I didn't, I really should learn to go with the impulse buying thingy sometimes.

Then we headed into the Elvis Museum where the first display that I noticed was one of some of his original costumes (I like things that twinkle and glitter) but Terry was off looking at the other side of the room where there was a display of some of his furniture.

See that just didn't interest me and I agreed with Terry when he said how sad he thought the whole thing was, with the poor guys personal life layed out for people to pick over and make their own. How can anyone live like that, I guess it's the curse that was a part of his fame and is for any famous person now. It's something I've never understood, but I've never actually been repulsed by it, I just don't look at it if it doesn't interest me.

I did notice that there was a whole display case of Elvis's first haircut when he joined the army, there were photos and a lock of hair, and a copy of the magazine that was giving away that lock of hair in a competition. Hmmm that's kinda bizarre.

I found out that the first Elvis impersonator started in 1956, guess Jim Smith knew a good thing when he saw it and decided to get in early. I also found out that Elvis was big on helping people, he gave out money to charities and helped numerous causes in his life, I wonder why we never hear about the good things he has done but hear all about how he liked fried banana sandwiches.

I knew he was into cars and bikes, but I didn't realise on what kind of scale he was into them. He had heaps!!

And most of them were pretty exciting vehicles, he was into adventure and excitement!!

There just has to be some scrap metal art somewhere here ...

Oh there it is!!

We moved out of there to the car museum which has the last car that Elvis owned when you first walk in the door, I wonder why I didn't take a pic of that, I think I was starting to feel a bit Elvis'd out.

But there were a bunch of awesome old cars and bikes here ... wheeee!!

Bikes.

Even a couple of scooters.

And Cars.

This is turning into one long post, but it was turning into one long tour too, we still had two museums to look at, the one of the history of Parkes and the Farm Machinery one. We skipped through the Historical one quickly and made our way out to the sheds.

Where we found ...

Farm Machines!!

 

 

I may be able to start a career in standing next to big wheels on harvesters for photos, this is the second I've posed next to this year, the other one was a lot newer and a lot bigger but when you compare the wheels, the older one had a much bigger wheel.

There were a couple of train carriages there as well, these brought back some nostalgia for me as my main mode of transport when I was a youngster was by train, we used to ride what we called 'red rattlers' in the late 70's to the beach whenever we could.

This one was surrounded by junk but also had the look of being restored, I hope it is because its a great piece of Australian social history.

Those old rattlers were replaced sometime in the late 70's to early 80's by the silver bullets .. they were pretty much the same inside and they still rattled around on the tracks, but hey they looked pretty slick.

This one was open so Terry and I headed in to catch a whiff of some nostalgia .. and old vinyl.

Hmm looking at the graffiti in here makes me think these trains were around earlier than I remember. See ... Social History!

Typical Aussie farm equipement ...

To the next shed, and what have you found Terry?

Oh an antique farm bike!!

Honestly we have no idea what this is, but it looked fun. I just dont know where you sit ...

This shed was full of trucks and the like on one side and a ramshackle assortment of interesting farm stuff on the other side. We poked around for a while and found ...

A wool baler.

Butter Churn.

What is that Terry? Looks like it was pulled by horse.

A Water Cart, it seems to be full of advertising for itself there.

Fridge ? Not sure what they called this but I know it was used for food storage.

The original Trundle Bushfire Truck

The shed we just went through from the other side. All lined up and ready to roll.

Sunshine was apparently the ultimate in farm machinery. I remember that symbol if nothing else.

All the tractors

Plow anyone?

Well that was fun, We headed back inside to the Historical Museum now and had a bit of a poke about .. we found some interesting convict recipes ...

Now I thought that camels were introduced to Australia a long time after the convicts came here, I guess I was wrong.

There were all sorts of interesting things about Sir Parkes, he seems to have been a bit of a character, and he certainly looked like one. This is a more sedate portrait of him with his third wife.

Some of the photos here were facinating, piles of rabbit furs and bunches of men in suits standing round looking very hot .. I was tickled by this one.

The rest of the day we just kept out of the heat and looked and listened to some Elvis's, it was starting to get a bit monontonous so I won't share that bit again.

The next morning we headed home, there's a bit more to share with that little trip but this post is becoming so epic that I think I may just have to end it here and tell you all about our return trip at a later date.