With only a five hour drive to Hay in front of us traversing roads like the Hume Highway that have long since become familiar byways, we launched off on our journey around lunchtime, spending the morning Farewelling our fur child for her first kennel sojourn, and enjoying a leisurely morning. We had packed a picnic basket of goodies from the Ainslie IGA cheese and deli case and a bottle of champagne to enjoy with our desert view on night two At the last minute we decided to take a detour through the Riverina to pick up some extra supplies. It has become a favourite thing to do on a road trip whether it be the Adelaide Hills or Lancaster County Pennsylvania, so we thought we should also do it this time.

Instead of driving to Wagga Wagga, we turned off the Hume at Gundagai (no we didn’t stop at the dog on the Tuckerbox) and headed for Junee Junee for their home-grown liquorice and chocolate factory. The GPS told us we were going to arrive two minutes before closing – we whittled that down to six minutes, with a police car behind us for the last 15 kilometres. When we arrived, there were plenty of people in the café gardens and they didn’t show any sign of closing l so we wandered through the shop collecting more chocolate than a human being needs in a year and walking out with a selection platter, some choc covered liquorice and pretzels and a pack of giant freckles. Way more than we needed as dessert to our cheese platter, but holidays are all about indulgence.

Recognising that we wouldn’t make stop two before closing  – Coolamon Cheese in the village of Coolamon, we ventured into Junee’s old main street to see if the local IGA stocked local produce (like our which now offers a range of take home meals from Dobinson’s, Ramen Daddy and Italian and Sons. In Junee there wasn’t anything even remotely local – not even from the nearby liquorice factory. The funny thing is I am fairly sure Coolamon cheese, which makes an award-winning brie, is stocked at Ainslie IGA.

The old main street of Junee looked just like something out of a 50s movie with green lawns and rosebushes down the median strip and a still functioning (presumably) art deco cinema across the road. While country towns do see new development, it is at a slower pace than our cities and means that much of the heritage has been preserved. If what you really want in life is to live in a 1920s home, and belong to a community, find a job you can do from country NSW – many of these towns, including Junee have this feel in spades. I haven’t looked at the real estate market, but I dare say you’d pay a lot less out here as well.

We pushed onwards to Coolamon and alas, as predicted, Coolamon Cheese was shut. What we did find is the first of many Jacaranda trees on our journey west and the aptly named Pretoria Street. Some things in the country are less predictable, like award winning brie in Coolamon but others are just as cliched as you’d imagine, like the pub in Grong Grong, home of the famous picnic races, calling itself the Grongy. Shortening words and then adding a y to them was a very Queensland thing years ago but the cancer has definitely spread and not just to inner city Melbourne, home of the Espy.

Despite Google Maps telling us the road to Narrandera was closed, we followed the sage advice of the Roads NSW live app and continued on. At some point on our journey, we saw a very wrecked car on the side of the road, but it looked as though it had been there for hours if not days. As we drove through Narrandera, across the Murrumbidgee River and drove through town we spotted another new phenomenon that has spread like wildfire across grain producing regions – a mural on A grain silo. We didn’t stop for the Big Guitar this time (as we had already captured it on a previous trip through these parts. As we pressed on to Hay, we followed the rail line for a time through scrubby bush until the Hay plains opened up before us. From Wagga all the way to the NSW border, the main highway from Canberra to Adelaide is one lane each way with ho even an overtaking lane in sight. With speed limited trucks, you get surprisingly good at adrenalin raising passing manoeuvres on the wrong side of the road.  The Riverina and Sunraysia regions are the food basket of Australia and while many of the farms are hidden by the scrub, or behind barren plots, you do see evidence of the harvest – fields of grain, combine harvesters humming away, throwing up clouds of dust as they race against time and weather, newly seeded rice paddies, irrigation channels, and the occasional orange tree. There were also newly ploughed plantings with rows of green shooting through the rows of earth, creating a rhythmic optical effect as we drove by at speed. [Sudan – Buju Banton – I discovered Buju Banton’s dance hall/reggae jams when on a discovery of Jamaican ska. The modern light of what is a long tradition in a country I am desperate to visit next time I am anywhere near the Carribbean.]

An astute friend of mine had once commented – the Hay Plains, they’re plain.  Except when they give you a spectacular sunset. We had seen this before and it is usually more spectacular with either a cloudy or bright sky. Today was neither so we decided to head for Hay before the sun went down and the few restaurants in town closed. Along the way we spotted several roads south to Victoria, presumably with roadblocks. They were all pointing to Jerilderie, where, as dan helpfully pointed out, Need Kelly robbed a bank and penned a letter to authorities. One of the other things you see as you travel through western NSW are gaols – some historic like the ones in Narrandera and Hay but there are also newer ones still in use today, like the Junee Correctional Centre.

We arrived in Hay and found the Highway Inn Motel just before Dusk. We went to Reception – I love the country – the owners were friendly and the check-in quick and painless. We were in our prepaid room within five minutes of arriving and they put us straight in the empty room we had parked in front of. The room was large, renovated probably within the past five to ten years and clean with one of the biggest showers I have seen outside of the five-star hotels in Dubai. And it had a rain shower head – bliss. The beds were comfy too. On the outside it looked like your bog standard country motel, built in the 80s with a table and chairs out the front of the door for smokers and a rose garden across the front. It also had a pool, but it wasn’t really warm enough.

After checking in, we headed straight into town to get some dinner – The Jolly Jumbuck Bistro in the Riverina Hotel serves meals from 6-8pm. It was 7:58 when we arrived but they still took our order. Like any good pub bistro, it was off a blackboard and most of the meals came with salad and chips or veges and a selection of gravy and gravy-based sauces (pepper, Dianne, Mushroom). Dan had the veal schnitzel with pepper sauce. While I was tempted by the nostalgia of crumbed lamb cutlets, I went for a rib eye with mushroom sauce. We both chose chips and salad, washed down naturally, with a middy (we were still in NSW). For the non-Australians, a middy is the smaller size glass when ordering on tap beers in NSW. The larger size is a schooner. Like most of the crazy parochial things that grew out of our crazy federalism, the sizes of beer pours, and even more confusingly the names, are different in each state. Victoria has pots! In urban areas on the coastal fringe, you will find English style pints served, a holdover from the fake British pub craze of the late 80s and early 90s, but you generally don’t find them in country pubs. [She – Green Day – Not one of the first tracks I think of when I think of Green Day’s breakout album but it does highlight just how strong an album Dookie is. My first copy was a bootlegged tape that I listened to during hours of sanding my first (and still unfinished) furniture design project.

When our food arrived, it was massive – Dan’s schnitzel looked like half a cow – probably more on the yearling side than veal, he said it was still awesome – the steak was fantastic – really tender and both the sauces were amazing. The chips were crispy but fluffy inside – definitely double fried and the salad reminded me of childhood – iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber and carrot with kraft French dressing which you can’t get in supermarkets anymore but can obviously still find in catering packs. This was great pub food – just the way its supposed to be – good quality, tasty and without pretention. Alas the kitchen was closed by the time we had finished so no option for dessert and there were some faves on the menu – passionfruit cheesecake and sticky date pudding among them. Dan posted that he will forever be haunted by not tasting the homemade sticky date pudding given the quality of the other offerings. The pub has promised to shout him one next time he is in the area.

Still craving dessert, we stopped by the local takeaway come Christmas shop and checked out their ice cream freezer – I tried to make up for the cheesecake loss with a passionfruit and coconut Weiss bar but it wasn’t the same. Dan’s microwave single serve sticky date pudding was even less successful at hitting the mark – at least the Weiss bar tasted like passionfruit.  Let me just say, Hay, or at least the main street and Riverina pub are not really thumping at 9pm on a Saturday so we headed back to the motel and turned in so we could get an early start on the road to Broken Hill the next morning