Our 4th morning on the road, we pulled out of the Sheba Dams campground early and head out on Forest Way into Hanging Rock State Forest, an area full of huge pine trees, kangaroos and dirt roads. We were in gold mining country, and stopped at the Hanging Rock cemetery to take a look. We also stopped at these cool old trucks that were just sitting in a cleared area of the forest.
We kept on going, hitting the Nundle Road at Woolamin, where I stopped to take some photos of postboxes (I have a soft spot for lines of postboxes!). I wish I'd taken a few more photos of the drive there, but honestly I was enjoying it so much that I forgot.
We kept going up the Nundle Road all the way to Tamworth, where we filled up with food and water, then went up the New England Highway to Armidale. Sadly, we didn't get to go into Armidale itself, as I was planning to go to this National Trust place nearby, and we ran out of time.
So the National Trust in the UK also has some properties that it manages in Australia. Being a fan of their work over in England, I decided to add Saumarez Homestead to my list of places to go to, and I wasn't disappointed! Although, sadly, we couldn't go inside the house, as it's only open on weekends, but the gardens and all the old farming sheds were awesome.
Saumarez Homestead is a heritage-listed property that was completed in 1906 (old-ish for Australian building standards) in the Federation Edwardian style. Its quite distinctly Australian, with lovely covered balconies and verandahs.
The farming sheds outside contained most of their original old farming gear, including cards and saws, tractors and, oddly, a few old fancy cars.
We left Saumarez at 4:15pm, and decided there was not time to go into Armidale as it got dark around 5:30ish and we needed to drive to a campsite and set up camp for the night. We found this free campsite at Yarrowyck Crossing on one of our camping NSW apps, and drove a long way down a dirt road to get there. It was a very interesting place, with a river and an old road that looked like a convict road (very cool!). We were the only people staying there, and it was a little strange as it was actually just the two of us sleeping on the ground in the middle of the bush. Thankfully, some nice person had left a whole lot of firewood, so we stocked up on that, and had a tasty dinner of sausages and salad. We were surrounded by wildlife that night, and we saw a possum and her baby, a sugar glider, a lot of kangaroos and, scarily, a redback in the dunny.