Alright folks, time for Roadtrippin Bliss Part 2… If you missed the first installment, probably best to go here first.

So after the last episode there was lots of driving driving driving.  (What a surprise on a roadtrip… ) Then there was some more driving.  I’ve gotta say, Denise is a powerhouse behind the wheel.  The entire journey I only drove 2 hours I think… and only because Denise looked like she was about to pass out from exhaustion somewhere near Moree.  After a 30min passenger seat power-nap she was back on track and drove the rest of the way to the Ridge. Amazing…about 12 hours after we left home we arrived in the Ridge.

Welcome to Lightning Ridge…

Very interesting place.  They had had quite a bit of rain the week before we were there so there was lots of muddy mud (is there any other kind?) hanging around  This is what most of the landscape was like…

Yay for us, we made it -

We arrived about 2pm in the afternoon, did a lap of the town (yep that pretty much covered it), booked in to the first motel we found, and slept.  No photographic evidence of life from the two of us until our second “Dawn Service”

(this is not the motel)

Yes. We are HARD CORE photographic-journeywomen.

We got up at 5.30am to get the kooky morning light… there’s nothing quite like it…

These were all taken across the street from our motel, and up the road just a little.

Rusty old car bodies in an abandoned opal mine… it doesn’t get better than this.

There was a nasty sign that said that we shouldn’t enter into the rusty car zone, and we soon discovered why… big opal-less holes in the ground.

(read – old mine shafts.)

HARD CORE

enough rusty cars, as the morning progressed we did another mine tour …

ohhh dead tractors, my second favorite thing to photograph in Lightning Ridge…

someone left a perfectly good car seat lying around.  It was actually quite comfy (Denise made me sit on it for a photo…)

Denise in action,  framed by aforementioned comfy car seat -

denise in action again, practicing the artistic-scarf-toss.  I asked her to bring a veil so I could indulge my veil-in-the-wind fetish, but she must have forgotten to pack it.

more artistic-scarf-tossing.  Denise is quite an expert…

We laughed and joked at how muddy the mud was here at Lighting Ridge… but that was before we met Walgett sticky-mud quicksand.  It makes your boots look like Yeti-feet.  But that comes a little bit later in the day…

Denise standing very close to the edge of a swamp -

After we got our fill of rusty old cars, dead tractors and muddy mud, we did another lap of town and decided it was time to move on.

Goodbye Lightning Ridge.

So the road out of Lightning Ridge basically looks a bit like this pretty much all the way to Walgett.  That’s about 2 hours worth of roadtrip-chats-that-will-change-the-world (we had lots of those )

Of course we stopped for a photo.

and we practiced our synchronised-jumping-for-the-camera-timer and found that we suck at it.  (Denise has those shots…)

So we were driving driving driving solving all the worlds problems and saw this…

so of course we had to get out and take a gazillion photos.

It was all going swimmingly, both of us joking about taking out Landscape Photographer of the Year next year,  until Denise decided she had to go in closer for that potential award winning shot… and that’s when the great Walgett Sticky Mud disaster happened…

(camera shake from hysterical laughter…)

the ensuing Yeti-feet syndrome -

Let me tell you… that stuff is HARD to get off.

But because we are so HARD CORE we pushed on and followed the railway tracks off to the other side of the quicksand to take more photos, yeti-feet and all.

Birds!  I like photographing them almost as much as I like photographing sheep…

So after we got most of the mud off our boots, we hit the road and did some more driving driving driving and having more roadtrip-chats-that-will-change-the-world until we decided it was time to practice our synchronised-jumping-for-the-camera-timer again…

Bingo!  and only on the 5th go I think.

So I think it could be time to wrap up this episode of Roadtripping Bliss with a cliffhanger…

(que cliffhanger music…) will Denise throw in the towel and walk the whole way back to Brisbane, or is she in it for the long haul to the G (Grenfell)?

stay tooned for the next exciting episode of Roadtrippin Bliss (after I have a good sleep and design a wedding album or two..)

do comment if it takes your fancy…