Thursday 14 April – A twist and a turn

Current location: Adaminaby
11.11pm, Getting into bed. In the Kombi. Outside a mechanics garage. #offthebeatentrack
Today was, in equal part, beautiful and hilarious.
We started out adventuring to Batlow (famous for apples), where we ate delicious cakes and, er, apples. Seriously, the apples. They were so good! We also went past a very beautiful dam/lake, called Blowering Dam, which was so pretty!

As we adventured onwards, Andy stopped to take a photo (an extremely common occurrence) then, when he went to drive off again, the accelerator cable snapped. We didn't know that at the time, we just knew something was wrong and we couldn't drive, we were an hour's drive from the nearest town and we had no phone signal (turns out we were about a 20km walk from where there may have been signal). Very, very luckily, some rangers drove past, saw we were stuck, diagnosed our snapped cable, and called roadside assistance for us. All we could do was sit and wait, then get towed to the nearest town, which turned out to be Adaminaby.

Mike the Mechanic looked at the Kombi, said he couldn't fix it until the morning, and left us to sleep outside his garage. He also told us that 'Thursdays go off in the pub' and that there was a new chef in the bistro, who was keen to impress, so we should have dinner there. Bear in mind, this is a town of 200 people, so the dinner options were limited to the bistro or the pub anyway. Bistro it was... and it was pasta night. I loved this little town so don't want to badmouth it, but let's just say I can't imagine what the dishes would have been like if the chef wasn't trying to impress.

Off we went to try our luck at the pub... It's fair to say it wasn't exactly going off by Sydney standards, but it did serve $3 wines, and the greyhound racing was on the TV in the corner, so Andy and I settled in for the evening and put on a few bets, with 'Sketchy Nick' winning $40 for us. Cheers Nick the Greyhound! It was such a fun night, and people could not have been friendlier or more helpful. Now, this town wasn't on our original list of places to visit in the Snowy Mountains, but it actually turned out to be a brilliant stop along the way.