The first outing with the Subaru.

Our old car has had to put up with a lot over the years including teaching both our girls to drive.  And it was sporting all the experience and marks that comes with that.  So it was time to upgrade.

Enter one Subaru Liberty.

On Friday when I got home from work Deb and I almost in unison suggested that we take the car for a spin out to Cowra (just under 200km away) on the weekend to check out the  Japanese gardens as it’s been over 10 years since we were last there and after the amount of rain we’ve had in the last few months the gardens should look great.

So with the sun shining and the sun roof open we hit the road for an afternoon’s drive.

And the verdict. It’s a really nice car to drive and handles the back roads very well.  While it doesn’t have the same level of power as the old car it still has enough hustle to overtake without too much of an issue. Of course the advantages of less power is better fuel consumption and with an average of 7.2 ltr/100km I think that’s pretty good and represents close to 800km to a tank (60ltrs) of fuel.

And the gizmos – and there are a heap of them.  A few worth mentioning –

• Lane Departure warning – on nice wide roads like freeways this rarely comes on unless you decide to overtake and forget to use your indicator in which case it flashes and beeps at you.  However on narrower back roads (with marked lines) it can go off quite a bit if you cut corners (outside or inside) and that can be a bit annoying.  But other than that it is a good feature.
• Active Cruise Control –  This stops the cruise control wars you have when you are happy with the speed of the car in front but can’t quite match their speed so you are either constantly catching them or dropping back. Active Cruise Control puts an end to that as all you need to set is the distance from the car and it will merrily maintain the same speed as the car in front up to your set speed. While it may sound like it a further distraction, in practice it works very well.
• Memory seats – I have to admit that I really like this feature. I don’t know about you but it takes ages to get the seat just where you want it, and then someone goes and adjusts it.  Not only can you memorise the seats location but you can set it to your key fob so when you walk up to the car and open the door it the seats magically moves to your position as it’s way of saying welcome back.

As we pulled into the Japanese gardens at Cowra a wedding party was just arriving. This is certainly a beautiful backdrop for a wedding and a really nice place to just wander through the beautiful gardens.

I’d highly recommend a visit to these gardens if you’re in the vicinity.  All the more interesting with the iconic backdrop of the Australian landscape.

When travelling through the countryside it is not unusual to see hay bales in paddocks.  It is however a bit stage to see them dressed up as different characters.  It looks like there was a competition for the Morongla (population of 40) annual show.  Here are a few of the entrants that we saw as we headed home.

Mr Squiggle

Dorey

Shrek’s donkey

Echidna

Redback spider