I’m starting today’s post with some wisdom.
Firstly from my mother: “If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Secondly from a wise, although unknown source: “All things being equal, fat people use more soap.”
Which reminds me, I seem to be using more soap lately …
With both of those pieces of wisdom in mind, I will make an observation about sitting around the campfire last night listening to Errol What’s-his-name singing his songs about farting.
Yes, he really did sing songs about farting. That’s why I only rated the entertainment an “OK” in yesterday’s post.
There were probably 60 or 70 people in their camp chairs last night with us, and many of them were really, really fa …. er … had a really, really large surface area.
One bloke had such an incredible amount of surface area that he could barely carry his chair and walk at the same time.
And I couldn’t help but think to myself, “Wow! I bet he uses lots and lots of soap!”
Even Kerri commented on it, and she never says anything bad about anybody!
Goodness only knows how they get in and out of their caravans. They must have had extra wide doors fitted.
Emerald was nice, but the flies nearly drove me mad. These tiny little black things that like to crawl in your ears and up your nose.
Argh!
And the Emerald Tourist Park was quite a nice place to stay the night. They are expanding the site (a good thing) but there was lots of mess and noise from the trucks and bobcats etc, which started a bit too early this morning for my liking 🙁
I actually thought that the clientele at the Emerald Tourist Park was a little different to most other places that we have stayed in the last week or so.
Here are a few observations to support my case:
There was the usual powered and unpowered sites, and cabins, plus there seemed to be a number of dongas like you see at mine sites. Not the kind of thing that your average tourist would choose to stay in.
When you put that with the fact that there were quite a number of people sitting at their vans wearing PPE, it makes me think that they must be there for work – possibly at the local mines.
And the final piece of evidence is that many of them seemed to be there for the long haul.
Our neighbours, “Sambo and Jenny on UHF 40” according to the signage on the back of their van, had a fence set up to keep their dog in, Jenny was out front watering the grass when we arrived, and they had a lawnmower – yes, a lawnmower – amongst their worldly possessions stored under their van.
Sambo – I assume that it was Sambo – turned up at about 5.00pm dressed in his PPE, with dirty hands and a look on his face that said “I’ve had a really crappy day at work and now I’m going to drink myself into oblivion to forget all about it”.
And Sambo was gone again the next morning while Jenny sat out in the sun looking at her grass.
I have a view that some of these van parks were originally designed as nudist parks.
Why, you ask, would I think that? Because the showers have absolutely no consideration for the fact that you have a set of clean clothes that you need to keep dry for the duration of your shower and while you get dressed.
I challenge you to give it a try … step into your shower cubicle at home wearing your PJs, and carrying a clean (and dry) set of underwear, plus a shirt and jeans and maybe a sweatshirt if it’s cold. Don’t forget you’ve also got your toiletry bag and whatever other stuff you need, because you have to be carrying it all with you.
Get out of your PJs and hang them, along with all of your clean clothes and your other stuff on maybe 2 hooks on the back of the door. Not the bathroom door – they have to hang inside the shower with you.
There are no shelves or other useful places to store your stuff – just two hooks on the back of the door.
Now try and have a shower without anything falling onto the wet floor, or without everything getting wet while you are splashing around in the shower, washing your hair.
Now try and get dressed again in the impossibly small confines of the shower cubicle without falling over.
See what I mean?
I am convinced that these showers were designed for a nudist park because there is no consideration for the fact that you have a set of clothes that you need to keep dry!
I’m sure that they assume you are going in naked, and coming back out naked. No clothes required.
Enough said.
Pop top vans are a wonderful invention. Ours sits nice and low behind Elsie and doesn’t cause too much wind drag.
But one of the problems of having a pop top van is that because the top comes down, everything inside the van has a height limit – like the mirror – so to see yourself in the mirror you have to get down on your knees!
One day we will have a full height van and we will look back at this photo and laugh 🙂
We packed up the van and loaded up the car with all of our essential supplies that we need to keep close at hand – thermos of hot water, coffee, cups, chips, chocolate … you know, all of the important stuff.
I realised this morning that we have very cleverly hidden all of our most essential items in a dry gin box that we keep in the car 🙂
We rolled out of the Emerald Tourist Park at about 9.00am and it was already pushing 25 degrees.
I couldn’t get out of the park easily this morning because this Silly Old Goat in a Pajero and a dual axle Jayco van decided that the exit road was a fabulous place to stop and have a chat with his mate … so I needed to go cross-country through the unpowered sites area to get out of the park.
I’ll refer to him as SOG from now on, out of recognition of my mother’s wisdom from the start of this post. Not that SOG is much better than spelling it out … but you do what you can, and it makes me feel like I’m making an effort.
When I pulled out of the park he was behind me, and by the time I got to the road leading out of Emerald he was in front of me again!
He obviously knew a shortcut that Google Maps doesn’t know!
So I was stuck behind him on the single-lane highway while he puddled along at 80km/hour, 20km/hour below the speed limit.
I’m sure that he was doing it to annoy me.
I finally got past him and managed to forget about him until I got to Comet – yes, there really is a township called Comet, 40km east of Emerald – and I needed to stop and make a phone call.
Just so you know, “stop and make a phone call” is not a euphemism for anything else … I really DID need to stop and make a phone call.
So I’m sitting there on the phone, stopped at the side of the road, and the SOG went past me, still doing 20km/hour below the limit and with half a dozen cars stuck behind him.
I finished my call, got back on the highway and managed to pass him again, and then the road sped up to 110km/hour and I had to wonder if he’d sped up to 90km/hour to maintain that “20km/hour below the speed limit because I’m a safer driver than you are” thing, or was he was now doing 30km/hour below the limit because 80 was his terminal velocity.
I guess that I’ll never know.
Today we travelled from Emerald, through Comet, Blackwater, Bluff, Dingo … and a whole bunch of other places through to Rockhampton.
Sadly I’ve not got all that much to report on any of those places, because other than a quick comfort stop and the opportunity to top up our caffeine level, we really didn’t stop at all.
That’s probably why the introduction to this post was so long … but you probably suspected something was up anyway, I’m guessing.
I can tell you that we knew we were back in civilisation when we went through Bluff (population 373) and there were 2 police at the side of the road with a speed gun pouncing on speeding motorists like crows on roadkill.
I’m pretty sure that old mate (SOG) would have safely sailed through at 40km/hour.
We also learned that Dingo is the birthplace of Ben Hunt (NRL player).
Probably the most exciting thing we saw were trains hauling coal, and they must have had more that 100 coal cars behind the twin engines … and we probably saw half a dozen of them.
We also saw this coal loading thingy across the road, obviously to load coal onto the trains.
Pretty impressive operation!
The roads were really good today, with an obvious lack of roadkill. Most of the way they were flat, straight and wide … which showed up in Elsie’s fuel economy, coming in at about 15.5 litres/100km – not too shabby considering the trip up to Charleville yielded closer to 20 litres/100km.
For those of you that don’t understand litres/100km, small numbers are great, big numbers are bad.
15.5 litres/100km is nothing to write home about, but it’s pretty good considering I have 2 tonnes of van on the back.
There was a fair bit of roadwork which slowed us down a bit.
And you may have noticed that I straightened the UHF aerial on the Elsie’s bull bar. It had this “Leaning Tower of Pisa” thing happening and it was playing havoc with my OCD.
We made it into Rockhampton at around 12.30pm and I have to say it was a bit of a shock to the system to have to deal with multiple lanes of traffic, traffic lights, pedestrians, etc … something that I haven’t dealt with for almost 2 weeks.
And it was 32 degrees!
Tonight we are staying at the Island View Caravan Park at Kinka Beach – just south of Yeppoon.
Really, really pretty, green little park and just across the road from the ocean. And by the time we got here – closer to the water – it was a much more pleasant 28 degrees.
I feel like I’m cheating on you all by spending a couple of nights at the beach when we are doing an outback adventure … but then I still think of Rocky as a country town, and we will be back in the outback again in a couple of days 🙂
We set up the van …
… then went out exploring the surrounds from Yeppoon to Emu Park.
So far on this trip we have done 2,700km, and we still need to get home from Rockhampton yet.
This is what today’s trip looks like: Emerald to Kinka Beach, about 4.5 hours in the car and covered just over 300km.
And Kerri tells me that the van does have a name – Holly.
Short for Holiday.
If I thought that Emerald was the Promised Land, then Kinka Beach is Heaven! Such a beautiful spot, green, grassy, and with that beautiful salt air smell.
I can’t wait to get up early tomorrow, cross the road and go for a walk on the beach.
See you then!
Ciao