NSW – VIC Country trip: 18 March

Wednesday March 18

Arno’s pictures of last night’s sky have been added at the bottom of yesterday’s post.

Today we completed our town walk of Gulgong, spending most of our time at the Gulgong Gold Experience, right after we stopped at the local IGA to get a few things for our dinner, where we found little available in an otherwise big supermarket.

Apparently there is no stock in the warehouse… It may be that these regional towns are dependent on regional warehouses which would not have been prepared for the crazy demand, and now in turn need to get more from their distribution channels.

It is unfortunate that the stockpiling also hit regional NSW (albeit only a about a week ago) as it’s likely that these places are not as close to supplies sources as the cities or have the frequency of deliveries – additionally, they also have a high number of elderly residents.

On to the Gold Experience, given this is the region where that’s what people mined & panned some 150 years ago… The place is located where the first nugget was found and gives visual and audio information about the history of the gold years (https://www.facebook.com/gulgonggold/). Good fun, and again, the best weather for pictures, see below.

The total mined from these goldfields was around 15,700kg, which at today’s price of around US$1,540/oz would be worth around US$770 million (just under 700 million euro).

Apparently some 10kg gold from this region was ‘found’ only about 5 years ago, in a cardboard box used by the Treasury staff as their hallway cricket wickets, it seemed to have been there for safekeeping…! ( https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2015/12/17/Maitland-Bar-gold-nugget-was-once-used-for-hallway-cricket/2361450366268/)

We continued our walk, and passed some lovely buildings and houses, all in good state of repair and a delight to just look at.

Arno then took himself off to the golf club around the corner to hit some balls.  The absolute best of weathers for it.  Packing up tonight as we’ll be leaving this place in the morning.