Judy & Brian Tour Oz

 A new post in here is well overdue, so here goes! 30 October  - 3 November. Canberra - Cowra 190km Finally lockdown has eased and we can grab a few days away. We chose Cowra because its not the coast, which is heaving. The van park in Cowra is very nice and sits on the banks of the Lachlan river, right next to town. I even got a haircut in a real barber shop, must be one of the last cash only enterprises in Australia, just heaps of loose notes in a drawer, no register, no receipts, just a healthy cash economy. One reason I wanted to come here was to go to the Wyangala Dam, and see if I could see where some photos of mum and dad were taken back in the 1940’s. This plan was never going to work, for a start the original dam is buried under a massive rock-wall dam and new gates and spillways. Apparently the old dam wall can be partially seen when the water level drops below 30 percent or so. Looking at the old photos I can now see that those sites are almost certainly under the w...

We left Airlie Beach early and headed north, first to Bowen and then Ayr, where we took our first break. We were back on the Bruce of course, but surprisingly it seems to have survived the road works and is quite an easy drive. One thing that is noticeable almost straight away is that the landscape is changing; we are now in country reminiscent of the outback, huge, wide totally dry river beds, rocky outcrops and fringing mountains. About 30km north of Ayr we took a left turn toward Woodstock, bypassing Townsville and saving ourselves about a 100km and an hour. As we drove along this beautiful valley we slowly started to realise that we had in fact been down here before; last year when we stayed in Townsville and took a big day trip down tho every road. From Woodstock the road opens up and is wide and smooth, giving us a pleasant run through to our destination. With John Williamson's song of the same name ringing in our iPod, we did indeed make it into Charters Towers, not quite ...