Roadtrip July 2021: Day 4 – St George > Bollon > Cunnamulla (well, almost …)

If you felt let down that yesterday was a slow news day, you are going to be particularly disappointed today.

This morning we skipped breakfast in a vain attempt to offset some of the damage done by the fabulous chicken parmys from dinner last night, had coffee and went straight to packing up the van after two nights in St George.

We’ve got it down to something that could almost be described as a smooth and seamless operation – everything locked, attached, connected (or disconnected), switched off (or on), wound down (or up), closed (or opened), water tanks filled … all done as required, and as expected, and without any risk of divorce.

Just before 9.00am we were ready to roll out of the caravan park, and I gave a fleeting thought to what I would have been doing at that exact moment had I been at work today – and then I instantly dismissed the thought as irrelevant.

Now, before I tell you about today, there are a couple of things about St George that I wanted to comment on.

It was a bit unusual to see a sign in coming into town that says St George is a “Dementia friendly community”, and I’m not really sure what that means?

I had planned to put that picture up on yesterday’s post but … I completely forgot 🙁

I do have an idea of what that means, but I can’t say that I’m willing to think about it just now.

The other interesting thing about St George and some of these other outback Queensland towns like it is the different style of TV advertising that you see in the ad breaks of your favourite show:

• Farming equipment
• Cattle sales
• School is fun, get an education
• Keep St George scabies free …

… and then just as you are about to start your evening meal there is an advert that comes on showing a girl having dinner with her boyfriend, and she says “have you been tested for syphilis?”

Really? While I’m eating my dinner?

Today we were heading for Charlotte Plains Station for the night – a working sheep station just a bit east of Cunnamulla. The nice thing about Charlotte Plains is that they have an artesian bore head with 13 bathtubs, so you can fill a tub and soak in the warm water.

So far the roads have been pretty good, and it certainly spices things up a bit when you are confronted by a “wide load” coming towards you. I imagine that bottom edge of that bulldozer blade would do a bit of damage if you hit it.

The trip from St George to Charlotte Plains – about 245km in total – was the most boring and uneventful trip I have even been on. The roads started out good …

… and then got narrower with no lines …

There was only one small town on the way and that was Bollon (population 221). We had been travelling for about 90 minutes/110km and desperately needed to empty one tank and fill another.

So we made coffee and kept on rolling towards Charlotte Plains when we saw a road sign that says “Rough Surface next 22km”, and a rough surface it was.

The road kept changing from two lanes with a white line, to two lanes with no lines, to barely two lanes at all. In fact when a caravan was coming the other way, we generally needed to pull partly off the road so that we could pass.

And I have to tell you that there were a lot of caravans coming towards us! It felt like everyone was coming back from wherever it is that we are going. Van after van after van.

Sometime after Bollon we entered a dark and scary place with no phone reception and no internet. Yes folks, I can assure you that such a place exists and it is in south western Queensland. 

No phone service, no Google, no 4G … nothing!

And to make matters worse, Spotify had a bit of an issue not being able to stream music to our phone/s, so it started playing the same 4 or 5 songs over and over – “Stand by your man”, “Power of Love”, ”Brandy”, and “Kokomo”.

Now I just want to digress here for a moment and point out that this was MBW’s playlist, not mine. “Stand by your man” and “Brandy” are certainly not on any of my playlists!

We arrived at the entrance to Charlotte Plains Station at around 1.00pm and started the 15km drive into the camping area to be met by a rather unfriendly 70+yo lady at the homestead. She refused to discuss anything with me until I’d checked in using the Queensland Government’s COVID app (good, I guess), and then waved her hand at that dead tree “over there” and told me to drive past the tree another 3km or so to a camping area further into the property, described in the vaguest of terms (not so good..)

But we found it OK despite the hopeless directions and non-existent signage, and got set up.

I put the drone up again and got some nice aerial shots of where we camped.

Once camp was set up, we went for a drive (another 8.5km!!) to the bore head to secure a bathtub and soak our cares away.

The bore water was nice and relaxing and a pretty cool experience sitting in the tub watching the sun go down, but a bit of a shock to the system getting out into the cool breeze.

Despite all of the confusion, we were rewarded with the most spectacular sunset tonight and managed to capture some beautiful photos of the shearer’s shed building near camp in the gorgeous afternoon sunlight. 

After dinner we sat around the campfire with some of our fellow campers – Wayne, Janelle, Judy, Penny and Martin. Some of them were heading home after going to the Big Red Bash, some were heading home to the Hunter Valley after tripping around Queensland and the NT for the last 5 weeks, and Martin was heading towards Cairns.

And us? We are off towards Cunnamulla and Eulo tomorrow.

I told you it was another slow news day – sorry 🙁

Ciao