Roma Qld 19/20 July 2019

Roma Qld 19/20 July 2019

Leaving Lightning Ridge and heading north, the road continued to be a bit of a struggle, not as bad as before but not quite right either. However, past Hebel, which is in Queensland and on to St George it is in much better repair and makes for a safer more enjoyable trip. And you, it weren't to safe for the literally hundreds of 'roos splattered all over the place, mile after mile, some in groups of ten or so. As J Williamson sings, 'Birds flying round with a knife and fork, dam good feed for an eagle hawk'.

We had lunch in St George at a cafe that derives its fame from having engraved emu eggs, if you like that sort of thing. One reason I wanted to stop here was to see if the Town Fathers had paid any tribute to Len Waters, Australia's only Aboriginal fighter pilot, who earned his stripes flying a    Kittyhawk he named 'Black Magic' in New Guinea during World War II.

We ended up at the Info place and I asked the nice lady if she had ever heard of Len Waters and if there was a monument to him in town, and was surprised by her enthusiastic, 'Yes of course'. I was even more surprised when, upon asking for directions to see the monument she smiled and pointing through the front door said, 'No problem, it's right outside'.

John Johnson (left) & Len Waters (right) memorials. Surat Qld

Now fortunately for us, we like to read the local papers during lunch, and the one we read had the Surat service station up for sale, and it looked permanently closed. As we were about to pull out and head for Roma via Surat, a distance of some 240km, prudence dictated that we fill up before we leave as we wouldn't make it on less than half a tank. And a good choice too as there were no signs untrue way out of town to alert one to this situation, and sure enough it was closed. Surat is home to a rather nicely restored Cobb and Co coach, 'the last one to run' (in this area). We didn't stop so I'll sneak an old snap in for fun.

My main objective in Roma was to participate in their Parkrun event, which starts in the park right next to the van park, at the unseemly time of 7am in winter when it's zero or fewer degrees. I wore my Canberra Winter Parkrun kit, thank you. Actually it wasn't too bad as there was no wind and the sun started sneaking up at about half-past seven. The run itself is quite pleasant being a proper path that runs along the creek, down a long road, back, and out again up another bit of the creek before returning to the start.

There is not a lot of sights-to-see in Roma, especially if you've been here before, so we knocked over the Biggest Bottle Tree (in Roma), checked out the Roma Bush Gardens (a 20 year work-in-progress) which has been formed around the original water supply for the steam trains, drank coffee, and of course, wandered around the shops. The farmer's market as advertised in the brochure we found,  wasn't on. Puzzled, we asked the Info people about it who were perplexed until they discovered that the brochure we had found at the cafe was from 2014! We chuckled about this as apparently we were the fourth enquiry about this very thing this morning.

Roma Bush Gardens. Roma Qld

Bottle tree. Roma Qld