April 15th & 16th, 2011- Orange- Carcoar Dam near Blayney

Friday April 15 saw us pack up at Dubbo and travel through Orange to the Carcoar Dam near Blayney. Site was recommended by some other campers we met and is very nice free campground with wonderful views and good basic facilites. Flush Toilets, cold showers and dam water (not drinkable) Lots of room to spread out and have a fire. Several vans there but lots of room. The trip from Dubbo was uneventful and we quickly stopped at Orange Tourist Info site to locate water fill and dumpsite area. Once refilled we travelled south through Millthorpe and Blayney to the dam site. We set up and ventured into Blayney for groceries and then back to Millthorpe to spend some time in the Historic town which is a National Trust. Beautiful old buildings with many unique shops etc. I would compare it to Morpeth in our area. Many city folk there much better dressed than we were. We enjoyed a couple of hours walking around enjoying the shops and the architecture. Early 1800s for some of the buildings.


Saturday April 16th we left early for a day trip through Carcoar, Cowra, Canowindra, and Orange. We drove through Carcour which again is a National Trust. We were there to early for anything to be open but looked very interesting. We travelled to Cowra from there and explored the Japanese Gardens, War Memorial, and Japanese War Cemetary. Gardens were beautiful but both Sandra and I expected a bit more color given the time of the year. Only some of the fruit type trees were in full autumn colour. Very interesting history and war cemetary's were unique with the Japanese POW   cemetary adjacent to the Australian War Cemetary.











We travelled the short distance to Canowindra from there. It was a bit of a disappointment. Again it had some beautiful old buildings but everything seemed a bit run down and not as well looked after as some of the other small towns. We had planned to have lunch there but decided to press on to Orange as nothing really appealed to us there.
On the way to Orange we took the turn off to Mount Canobolis. Rough gravel road for about 9KM to a wonderful view point. Unfortunately as you can see from the pictures the weather was not great and visibility was limited. We filled up with fuel in Orange as we were on empty and had a nice pub lunch at the Royal Hotel (circa 1859). The autumn colours in Orange and the surrounding area were wonderful. I purchased a couple of bottles of local wine to sample later. We returned to our campground for a very wet and windy night. The Camps book had warned us that the location was windy as you would expect given the adjacent wind farm but we couldn't believe how the wind howled all night even shaking the caravan. We made the decision that we couldn't sleep another night in the wind so we packed up and headed for Goulburn on Sunday morning.