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.