Last night in Miles it was cold. Seriously cold.
The evening started with a pleasant chat with our fellow travellers around the fire pit, swapping stories … and we went back to our van at around the same time as I was about to lose some fingers to frostbite.
Had a lovely hot shower at the amenities block after dinner and was letting off ZZZZs by about 9.30pm.
I woke sometime after that – no idea when really because it was very dark and I wasn’t wearing my glasses … but judging by my level of bladder discomfort I’d guess it was around 1.00am – and I was absolutely freezing.
Teeth-chatteringly cold. You know that cold that gets in your bones and you can’t stop shaking? Yep, just like that.
I turned on the little fan heater and warmed the van up all nice and toasty and went back to letting off ZZZZs.
The sun rises later the further west you go. That’s probably intuitively obvious, but it caught me by surprise anyway. I think it was about 6.45 and it was still pretty dark. I checked the weather and apparently it got down to 4 degrees last night, so that explains the teeth chattering.
We headed off around 8.30am and kept heading west. We made it all the way to Dulacca (44km) before needing to make our first (comfort) stop.
I personally blame the cold weather, faulty plumbing, coffee and a couple of glasses of water.
Next stop was Wallumbilla for – yes another (comfort) stop. Another 60km achieved. A nice little craft shop run by these two old dears in the middle of nowhere.
They even had Devonshire tea – coffee and scones with jam and cream.
So this was the first puzzle for the day – how do they serve coffee when they don’t have a coffee machine?
“Oh, it’s instant coffee dear – we don’t have that fancy coffee here!” Fortunately it was another couple placing the order, so we dodged a bullet there!
We made it to Roma at about 10.45am. Heading into Roma we saw a sign advertising coffee and a donut for $3 at Pie Face at the local servo, and thought “how bad can a $3 coffee and donut be?”
So … it was OK. Not the worst coffee I’ve ever had; certainly not the best.
You know the saying “When in Rome …?”
Well, “when in Roma, do as the Roma-n’s do” … so we went to look at the Big Rig …
… and the biggest bottle tree …
… and checked out the Main Street of Roma …
… before doing more mundane things like going to Woolies to stock up on supplies.
At around 12.00 noon we once again headed west, towards Mitchell (the town, not the son who was married last weekend) …
The roads have been pretty good -everything west of Chinchilla has been posted at 110km/hour, although they are all pretty bumpy and rough … so 90-100km/hour feels much safer!
How do you measure progress in outback Queensland?
Litres per 100 km (not very good with 2.5 tonnes of van on the back and a strong headwind)?
Comfort stops per hour?
Dead kangaroos per km?
We passed through more funny-sounding towns …
… before arriving in Mitchell at around 1.30pm for a late lunch.
After lunch we went for a walk (only about 100m down the road from the Major Mitchell Caravan Park) to the Aquatic Centre to soak our cares away in the artisan spa for an hour or so.
We really should get one of these artisan/mineral spas installed at work and we would be so stress free!
We then went for a wander through the Main Street of Mitchell …
… and checked out the local general store that sold everything from boots to clothes, to spurs (for your boots) to guns and ammo.
Snappy!
We walked the street and found the world’s longest acronym – longer even than many words that I know!
The CWAATSICH. Stands for the Charleville Western Areas Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Health (Limited).
That was about all of the excitement that we could take for one day in Mitchell. Back to the van, chatted with our “neighbours” at the fire pit …
None of our “neighbours” was photo worthy, so we edited them all out and just kept the fire pit!
We watched the sun set through the trees …
… and then headed back to the van for dinner.
Looks like we are in for another cold night, so I might need to look out the thermals. I’d hate for my chattering teeth to wake up Kerri 🙁
At least the days (and nights) look like they are getting warmer!!!
That’s about it for tonight peeps.
230km, about 6 comfort stops, 1 coffee (and donut) stop, 2 tourist stops, about 1000 dead ‘Roos, dozens of those triple-length road trains (that are really hard to overtake with a van on the back) … and here we are in Mitchell!
Not exactly the stuff that our pioneering forefathers would have been proud of when they urged us to “go west, young man”, but a pleasant day on the road puddling along and watching the world go by … and certainly better than being at work!
Ciao