Wagga Wagga – Day 2

Arrived at Ford at 8am sharp. Then we walked the 1.8kms back into town to enjoy walking up the main street. By 10am it was hot and quite unbearable to be out in the sun. We stayed on the shady side of the street and found a café and had breaky and read the paper from cover to cover. We then continued down their lovely tree lined manicured main street. There were clipped shiny green hedges lining their main street along with large deciduous trees. There was a park bench usually in the shade every 50m or so and it was really pleasant. Their main street ran about 4-5 blocks – quite long in fact. They had many shops, and had cleverly hidden the larger and more usually ugly ones behind a small shopping mall front or something quite unobtrusive. They had a Harris Scarfe as well as a Myer store. I was surprised to see a Myer in town of this size, but there you go.

Reading the local paper we discovered that Wagga was very high on the list of contented towns. We were actually listing to a radio program about this a few days ago and according to the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, they found that the magic number is supposedly less than 40,000 people. Once you reach that sort of number, you’re large enough to have the services people require and small enough for people to feel part of the community. In the newspaper article they mentioned they measured many factors in the personal assessment, including; standard of living, health, achievements in life, personal relationships, how safe you feel, community connectedness, future security and spiritual/religions health. Apparently they interviewed 28,000 people around Australia and based on their answers came up with the magical number of 40,000… www.australianunity.com.au/wellbeingindex for more info.

Also learned some interesting (useless) information. NSW does not supply poo bags for the dogs that we have taken for granted as supplied in WA and QLD. Amazing. I don't know what people do, we've been told to buy our own! Luckily we still have some of the three thousand odd that dad pinched for us on his trips to WA and while we were in QLD.

We walked around till 3pm when they called to say our exhaust manifold was split and the seal to go with it. A part needed to be ordered from Melbourne and should be here till tomorrow.

We took no time at all to get to a caravan park and got a powered site for the night. What relief to be cold and need to put a blanket on to sleep!!!