It's been quite a while since we went to bed before 9pm, but we did last night and had a pretty good sleep, apart from being awoken by a car alarm around 1am, although Lucinda slept through that like a log. So we were up by 6am and back on the road before 8am, continuing along the Kidman Way. Last night we found that we'd left the laptop mouse at home and so Woolworths at Griffith was our first stop for the day to buy a replacement and we chose to fuel up there as well.

There was certainly more road kill along the road today compared to yesterday, but we also saw plenty of live animals on the roadside. There was sheep, goats, kangaroos and even an emu that was not content to stay on its side of the road and ran across the road not too far in front of us!

Apart from Griffith, our only other stop for the day was at Hillston where we stopped for morning tea at the bakery, but it wouldn't rank too high on the list of bakeries we've visited during our travels. So just before 2pm we rolled into the Cobar Caravan Park. After a sandwich in the van for lunch we headed to the Great Cobar Heritage Centre, which combines the tourist information centre with a museum. It is housed in the former administration building (circ 1910) of the Great Cobar Copper Mine. 

Much of Cobar's history is based on its mining heritage. Copper was the first ore discovered in the area, but as we read in the museum, that was a bit accidental, as it was only because a woman who had been born and bred in Cornwall, the heart of the British copper industry, identified some rocks collected by three men who had left Victoria to prospect for gold in the area, as containing copper. However gold and silver has also been mined in the area, and gold is still mined here.

Opposite the Heritage Centre is the Mining Heritage Park where there are various pieces of mining infrastructure on display, including a restored stamper battery from the Mount Boppy Mine, a fifteen metre high poppet-head from the New Cobar Mine, a loader from the CSA Mine and the headframe and winder from the Old Chesney Mine. But of particular interest was the two metre, 600kg bronze sculpture of a miner operating a drill. 

We got a better perspective of the size of the gold mining operation by driving up to Fort Bourke Hill Lookout. Fort Bourke Hill is the historical site of Cobar's first gold mine, the New Cobar Gold Mine. Peak Gold Mines operates an underground mine at Fort Bourke and from here we had a spectacular view of the pit and entrance to the underground mine from the viewing platform. The open cut is 380m in length, 200m wide and 150m deep. At the base there is an entrance to the underground part of the mine and we just caught a glimpse of a truck entering the mine.

It was great that despite the 400km plus drive from Darlington Point, we were still able to see some of the sights of Cobar before dinner, which was chicken schnitzel and steamed vegetables, followed by a cup of tea and the first piece of Lucinda's Orange slice for the trip.