Judy & Brian Tour Oz

  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 bo...

  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 tota...

  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 c...

  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.  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...

  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. Mol...