Charters Towers, Qld 30July2022 490km

 Charters Towers, Qld 30July2022 490km

Big long day in the saddle, pushing six hours, only stopped briefly for fuel at Clermont, no point in stopping anywhere else, almost like being in the real outback.

We started out early enough from Rubyvale and headed the back way to Capella, which is on the main road. When I say main road, I mean the Gregory Development road. It may have been the ubiquitous dirt track with a thread of tar up the middle once, but now its bitumen all the way. Well, there is one bit between Clermont and Belyando Crossing that would be better if it were dirt. 

Speaking of Clermont, the plan was to refuel there as it was another 370 to CT, with only the Belyando Crossing roadhouse in between, and as you can't guarantee that they will have fuel, the smart move is to fill up first. The servo was coming up on the left we slowed to maybe sixty to pull into the very big and long dirt approach to the pumps when just as we are about to leave the bitumen we both realised that there was something of a disconnect between the two surfaces, probed; y about a 200mm drop to be precise. We landed hard but apparently unscathed. Then we approached the pumps, but some clown had parked exactly a car width out form the pumps and wandered off to talk to some random truck driver. We bailed out and after a bit of fluffing about, got fuel further into town and hit the road again. Hit the road! Its like being on the end of a jack hammer for an hour so. Very tiring. 

But, lives little events jump up to keep you awake, don't they? We had come up to a gaggle of vans doing 85. they were well enough spaced and we got past the first two with not drama. As we approach the rear of the next van, lining him up for an overtake, a transport pilot coming the other way warned us of a wide load. Ok so no big deal, you’ve over to the fog line and keep going, well most normal people do. Not this clown, he hit the brakes and swerved half of the road and in a mad panic nearly lost it completely, and damn near wore 4 tons of Ford and Nova up his backside for good measure.

So we made it to the Crossing, but the thought of these people passing us was too much and I kept the hammer down.

More excitement. Another clown waiting at the exit from the roadhouse decided that they had better get out in front of us, because we were obviously going to go so slow. Grr. We rounded him up and even though he accelerated to 115 as we pulled out to pass, we went by anyway. Fortunately the road from the Crossing to CT is really good and we had a safe an uneventful last 100k or so into one of the best van parks in Queensland, the Big4 Aussie Outback Tourist Park.

Amused ourselves by doing some washing, some shopping and later, some snapping of sunsets, or more precisely, that lovely deeper afterglow that you get. Here’s my effort. 

Sunset. Charters Towers Style

Sunday. Our day off. Sat around doing nothing. Got to Woolies too late, it had closed, as had everything else that may have been open. Hey, this is the country life, chilled and relaxed. You just have to be wired 24x7.

Strolled out to the Tower hill and had another little poke around the bunkers and took some snaps. When you stop and look across the side of the hill, they are everywhere, but you daren't walk to them, you could get bitten by a snake or blown up by a 80 year old bomb or fall down a mine shaft. 

WW2 Bunker, Charters Towers

One of them had this video playing. You were supposed to be looking through the forward window of a B50 bomber as it flew there flak and cloud and then, the highlight, the screen set into the floor behind you came on and you could see the bomb-bay doors open and then the bombardier yells "Bombs away" and the doors shut. The pilot give a cheerio to his crew and heads for home. Apart from clouds and flak, the view never changes.

"Bomobs away!" "Roger that" "Tallyho chaps"

Rubyvale, Qld 27July2022 465km

 Rubyvale, Qld 27July2022 465km

Straight out of Roma and heading north, dream run through to Injune and then on to Rolleston, another 170km away along the Gregory Goat track. Actually its not that its so bad, its just not that good and makes for a pretty tiring trip. Oh but wait, Road trains and roadworks, what a combo. Rolleston is known by all travellers as a tiny place to get some fuel and a coffee in the tiny Pioneer Park. We did the latter but calculated that Emerald was well within our range at 400km.

Back into the fray and joined the convoy of vans and trucks, all stopped at the stop / go roadwork light. Just get going again, but no its stop again. On and on. Finally we made it into Springsure, the trucks disappeared, the vans all stopped for lunch and we lit of for Emerald about 70km further. This bit of road is great and we slid into town in record time, about four-and-half-hours for the 400km. We fuelled up and wandered the rest of the way out west to Rubyvale a total of 465km for the day and 1600 plus kms in four days.

Enough already, I've run out of puff and my gout is playing up and I just want to stop and do nought for a while.

But first, a quick walk, as quick as my dodgy foot will take me, up to the Vienna Strudel shop for coffee and strudel. Just made it before closing and relaxed for a while. We were told in no uncertain terms that if we wanted to eat at the pub at anytime, we’d have to book, so we booked diner for Friday night. Judy seemed keen to get back to the van where happy-hour was threatening... fire-pit, snag-sizzle and country singer. Well I was expecting the yodelling to start any second, but he stuck to good-old country, or might be western, I have no idea, but is nasally enough to be either.

Thursday. Is it Thursday? Who knows. All I know is that we don't have to get up and go, which to me is just fine. Four days on the road is obviously enough for both of us these days. When we did finally get moving we moved the 600m down the street to the the Miners Cottage,  where one buys a bag of ‘wash’ and proceeds to fossick the lazy way, complete with Scones and Tea.

Lazyway fossicking 101. Judy taking instructions from the resident Emerald Expert

Going solo. Oh, here's one, into the cup it goes. The two piles are the coarse and the fine, from the sieves of the same name. Basically anything in the fines is too small to get excited about, but you just can't help looking for some 'colour'.

Miners Cottage 'gold' mine

The final was subject to scrutiny by the resident experts. Most are just colour, the odd few are 'polishers' and the vary rare one is a 'cutter'

After lunch we had a bit of a walk around town and ogled some of the gems on sale. Some are very nice, and very expensive. But that’s what gets you hooked, one day you might just turn up a big old chunk of sapphire.

Roma, Qld 26JUly2022 422km

 Roma, Qld 26 July2022 422km

Today’s travel was delayed while I rewired the caravan trailer plug. It’s always the same, you check the lights, as we do every time, and one isn’t working. It’s always the plug and as soon as you open it up it becomes evident that its a wonder anything was working at all! Oh well, did what I needed to do to fix the immediate problem/s and promise to fix it properly... one day.

We were taking the back way up to Roma via St George and Surat. But first a very welcome stop after 122km of rough-riding through to Mungindi, right on the border. Actually there are two Mungindi towns, one in NSW and one in Queensland, The town is tiny but had a great coffee shop and bakery. We chatted to a local farmer who said it had only just stopped raining and the rivers were still rising. You would never know, it was a  glorious sunny warm day. We also asked about the pronunciation of the town name, and for you interest it is ‘Mung’, as in mung-bean, ’n’, as in cat ’n dog, and ‘di’ as in die, ‘mungndie’.

Fixer-upper Mungindi, NSW

Right outside town you cross the border, even if we didn’t notice it as we were too busy admiring how swollen the Barwon River was. Oh, that’s right, it is the border....

Speaking of borders, and you only find these things out after you’ve left the place, just to the west of Mungindi is a ‘one ton post’. Erected in 1881 by J Cunningham after he staggered in from Cameron Corner, where he had left a similar ‘one ton post’ to mark the other end of the 29th parallel, which is of course the border between NSW and Qld. This one is the original timber post, whereas the one at Camerons corner had to be replaced by a concrete pillar due to vandalism from 10,000 tourist a year. 

Furher up the road, which had thankfully settled down to a smoother ride, we cruised through Thallon, ‘famous’ for its painted silos, which we chose to not stop and gawp up. You be the judge, would you have stopped?

Silos at Thallon, Qld

On and on we pushed up and right on through St George, where we have stopped a few times already and thought we would fuel up at Surat 100+ kms to the East. Just outside St George, in the distance we could see a road train pull out onto the road ahead of us. Rats. Whats worse than one road train in front of you? Two of course. Now while the first one had plenty of time, that second one could and probably should, have waited. As it turned out, once they got the behemoths wound up to 100kph, they stayed rock solid at that speed for the entire way. I dialled in 99kph and followed them at a sensible distance, right across to Roma, as it turned out. Apart from two caravans doing snail-an-hour speed, the only other vehicles going our way were another road train and a truck with a wide load, both of which passed us and went and joined their mates up ahead. Good on all of them. 

Speaking of Surat, there was no fuel, a fact that came back to haunt us as we knew that from our previous trip this way, when we read of the closure of the Surat Servo in the local paper while drinking coffee in the carved Emu-egg coffee shop in St George in 2017. The quick calculation showed we had 122km range and it was 80km to go. No worries, as long as there are no hills.

Made it into Roma after five-and-a-half hours into a very welcome spot at the Big Rig Caravan Park. Much seemed appropriate as it was after 3pm. A dog’s eye and dead-horse at the local bakery also seemed an appropriate way to remedy the situation of a late lunch.

Moree, NSW 25July2022 380km

 Moree, NSW 25July2022 380km

The day started out with the run up through Gilgandra, past Balladoran and the property Warrawillah, where Judy’s father was born and raised. We then swung across to Coonabarabran, where we took a late morning tea and a rest at Roses Cafe, before the 200+ km leg up through Narrabri to Moree. For added interest, Coonabarabran is where my mother’s aunt lived with her family.

The road had been plain sailing so far but the farther north we went the worse the road got, most road works to do with the new $37bn freight rail link between Brisbane and Melbourne. The project upgrades a bunch of existing lines and adds a pile of missing bits to complete the 1700 km railway line. The link even spurs off at Parkes and heads to Adelaide and Perth. Each train is 1.8km long and carries double-stacked containers, just like the ones that run between Adelaide and Darwin. Each train is designed to put 180 B-Double trucks off the road.

Double-decker freight trains, heeding to a station near you. This one is in Port Augusta, SA

Now in the past, I have said some rather unpleasant things about Moree and especially about the caravan park where we had previously stayed, the one that had the big heated pools, one of which I’m sure was the inspiration for Cocoon. I really didn’t understand why we would be heading back there, but as we were booked into the Mehi River Caravan Park, and given that the last two of the five hours on the road had been a bit of trial, I was ready to try anything.

The park is a lot of things the other isn’t, not so large, nowhere near as crowded, certainly no cheek-by-jowl camping as we were at the last one and only one tiny spa pool. Not a cocoon to be seen floating anywhere!

Dubbo, NSW 24July2022

 Dubbo, NSW - 24Jul2022 - 410km

Our first day out after 3 years of covid lockdowns and generally being fiddled about. We are on our way to Cairns to pick up our twice delayed (originally overseas trips, now transferred to Outback Spirit) Outback Spirit tour of CapeYork. Mind you it was a close run thing: Covid is spreading seemingly unchecked through the Canberra Community. Our children had had it, our friends were down with it and it seemed almost inevitable that we too should succumb. Which we did and ‘luckily’ for us it was three weeks out from our start date so we feel confident that we should be able to get to Cairns without going down again. We have both been left weakened and lacking in get-up-and-go, which seems to have done just that. I have a dreadful choking cough and Judith has bronchitis, but apart from that wer'e fighting fit!

So this, our first day out was a 6 hour run from Canberra up through Booroowa, Cowra and on to Dubbo, with a stop in Molong for lunch. Molong was a bit of a surprise, we had formed the opinion from past visits that it was basically closed on Sundays, but this time through there is a great new eat-in cafe called Wildflowers in one of the side streets. Excellent!

We made it into the NRMA park in Dubbo in good time and were greeted by an immaculate park with all drive-through sites. We set up the van quick-smart and proceeded to sit in the sun for a hour or so. Two cute little grass parrots came  to visit and didn't seem the least bit concerned about us. We took some snaps to get started our photo gallery.

Continuing our tradition, the first night our dinner is eaten out, this time in the Dubbo RSL, a good meal with so much roast pork we brought the leftovers home for tomorrow lunches sandwiches.

Grass Red-rumped Parrot

Just how cold can it get in Dubbo? Very, very cold overnight as it turns out. We ended up with the doona, two blankets and I even had to put the track-pants and sweat shirt on and still froze all night. The heater went back on at 6am and stayed on until we left at 915.