The Zoo Part I, or: It's Way Too Freaking Early In The Morning For This

Hi. Remember me? The world's crappiest blogger who hasn't posted anything in six days? Sorry about that. Anyway, I'm here with the promised recap of our visit to the Taronga Western Plains Zoo, the one that I was sooooo excited to see during our trip to Dubbo for my citizenship test.

Because we'd decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get up close to the animals during a special dawn tour, we rolled out of bed at a ridiculously early hour. Now, I don't do mornings. It was freezing cold and pitch black outside when the alarm went off, and I voluntarily left a nice warm bed. This should give you some idea of how enthusiastic I was about this idea. By 6.25 we were on the road, and at just past 6.30am we pulling into the Zoo's main road.

As we approached the front gates, I started getting hyper over the animals we were going to get to see up close and personal. Giraffes? Elephants? Maybe even a lion! I was nearly vibrating from excitement by the time we hit the front gates.


Yes. Those front gates. The closed ones. As it turns out, the zoo was only doing the dawn walk on the weekend. Oops.


The Zoo didn't open until 9am. We had hours to kill and since we'd already checked out of our hotel room, no cozy bed to go back to nap in. So where do you go at dawn in Dubbo? The only place that's open. Hungry Jack's.

Aussie Tip of the day: Hungry Jack's is the Australian name for Burger King. Same chain, different name. When first opened franchises here, "Burger King" was already trademarked, so they had to come up with an alternate name.

We wasted about 40 minutes there, chowing down on greasy hash browns and reading the local newspaper. Eventually we ran out of boring articles to read, and since we didn't want to be Those People Who Hang Out At Fast Food Restaurants All Day, we made our departure. Even the store signage taunted me with false promises of close encounters with a lion.

Sorry it's blurry. Blame the husband who was driving the car and refused to stop so I could take a picture.

Since we still had another couple of hours to kill, we decided to cruise along Camp Road, a scenic drive that loops between tourist attractions nearby the Zoo.

That's where we spotted these little guys. Sometimes I forget that I live in Australia. So cool.

Yes, they really are the rodents of the outback. Just in case you were wondering.

The first stop on the road was the Dundullimal Homestead. There was only one problem:


It doesn't open until 10am, and we hadn't even hit 8am yet. Oh well. We'd seen on the signs that there was also a winery and an observatory on the road, so we kept going.


Ah. The winery is also only open from 10am. Moving on.

"Star attraction." Heh. Heh. Heh.

And naturally, the observatory is only open at night. D'oh!

So what do you do when you can't see a single attraction? You wash your car! Or at least, that's what you do if you're us and you've been meaning to wash your car for oh, about six months now. We followed the handy sign from the highway directing us to a local car wash:


That would be this car wash:


By this time I was laughing hysterically. Is anything in Dubbo ever open? Luckily, a little aimless driving brought us to this:


And there was no closed sign! Praise Jeebus!

Ben scrubbing. Me, uh, helping. Yeah. That's right. Helping.

Me helping some more. Photographic documentation is a very important part of cleaning a car, didn't you know?

Finally the car was clean, we were both queasy from our breakfast of deep fried hash browns, I was starting to twitch with impatience, and 9am had rolled around. It was time to see some giraffes!

Up Next: we finally make it into the Zoo.