2 Aussie Nomads

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

It was a bit of a slow news day today, so I’ll likely pad this post out with extra photos so that you think you are still getting value for money.

We had a nice, quiet day in St George today. One of my work colleagues – Jay – is from St George, so he was my go-to guy to get the low down on the things to do here … and we got some good tips!

We started the day in the usual way – coffee (duh!) – and headed out to see the sights. We started at the Balonne River and looking at the Jack Taylor Weir. There has been some good rain out this way, so it was quite full.

Like any body of water there is a risk of drowning, so the local council have nailed a CPR sign to a tree, but I imagine that the CPR rules have been updated since this one was installed 🙂

From there, we took a drive of about 24km back towards Surat to have a look at the Beardmore Dam. It is a beautiful picnic area which – today – was completely deserted.

The next thing on Jay’s list of things to see was the Cotton Gin. Now I confess to not knowing exactly what a cotton gin does, but given the amount of cotton that you see strewn along the side of the road from the harvesting and transportation processes, I guessed that it had more to do with cotton than it has to do with gin.

Now I’m not sure if we Googled the wrong thing, or went to the wrong place, but where we turned up was certainly not a tourist attraction, was not open to the public, and the gentleman who was at the site office regarded us with a certain amount of skepticism … but despite that he was pleasant enough, listened to our (albeit unusual) story, and welcomed us to take some photos of the cotton so long as we turned around and immediately left the property.

Oh, and then he told us that he hoped we enjoyed our stay in St George and our ongoing holiday 🙂

We were feeling a little decaffeinated after our somewhat unsuccessful trip to the cotton gin, so we headed back into town to look for a coffee shop.

We were also told that we should take a drive out to the irrigation area – an area about 25km south-east of St George which comprises >100km of irrigation channels, and used to irrigate 10,000 hectares of land.

While it was a lovely drive, there wasn’t a great deal to see as it appears that harvesting had occurred relatively recently, and there was just a great deal of big, brown paddocks as far as the eye could see.

The final thing that we were told we should do was to visit the Riversands Winery, even though we are not wine drinkers. So, go and have a look, we did.

Despite not being drinkers, we had a bit of a taste test and selected a bottle of Sparkling Sisters 2020 – a “lower alcohol fragrant sparkling (red) wine”. I’m not entirely sure what we are going to do with it – maybe drink it?

They say that you should never be photographed with a drink in your hand, and I can see why 🙁

Home for a bite of lunch, and then we pondered what to do for the afternoon.

Not far from St George – about 40km – is the oldest pub in Queensland, the Nindigully Pub. There was mixed reviews about the Nindigully Pub. Jay (the local) said “don’t bother”, while Alan & Gaye (our neighbours) said “don’t miss it”.

So we decided that for the sake of a 40km trip, and probably the only chance we will ever get to see the oldest pub in Queensland, we would make a trip out there and decide for ourselves.

The publican – as we were warned – was grumpy and unfriendly in an unwelcoming kind of way. But he happily took our money for the soda water and coke after insisting that we had checked in and that we paid in cash.

Go figure.

You can camp for free outside the Nindigully Pub, on the expectation that you will eat at the pub. Seems like a fair deal, expect that there were lots of people who had taken up the offer and it was pretty boggy and muddy.

One of my sons – Sam – loaned me his drone so that I could try to get some aerial shots of some of the places that we visit and stay. While I got the 10 minute training course when he gave it to me the other day, I hadn’t had the chance to actually fly it myself … so today was my first flight. We found a nice open park area back near the Balonne River and gave it a try.

Not exactly award winning photography, but hopefully I’ll figure it out. If you don’t see any more drone photos, you’ll know that I didn’t 🙁

It’s been a big day so we thought we’d go to the local Cobb & Co Hotel for a Chicken Parmy for dinner. We arrived a bit early so went for a walk down the river front before heading for dinner.

Chicken Parmys were fabulous and highly recommended. Home after dinner to watch the finale of Masterchef and then we are off towards Cunnamulla tomorrow, staying at Charlotte Plains station which includes soaking in bathtubs full of their hot artesian bore water. Can’t wait for that!

I don’t think we will have any mobile coverage or internet access tomorrow night, so there might not be a post … but I’ll make it up the next day, I promise.

Ciao

If every day of the trip had its own theme song, today’s would be “All Shook Up” … but I probably need to start at the start and work up to explain that bit.

Last night we stayed at Clover Hill Camping. I don’t know their full story but I’m told that they started out farming and were trying to build up a strain of cattle, but because of the drought they needed to diversify and so part of their property is now set aside for camping.

As a part of developing this strain of cattle, they have a prize stud bull named “Golden Nuggets” or “Golden Nuts” or something like that. Now that all seems highly inappropriate to me and I think that those who are sensitive about political correctness should be righteously outraged … but I don’t make this stuff up!

It’s on their website! That’s just a bit of trivia to get your attention and make you wonder where this is going.

Anyhow, the morning started out rather brisk in Chinchilla today. I woke from around 11 hours sleep (I was exhausted!) and it was a brisk 6.2 degrees – and that was inside the van. Outside was a mere 2 degrees.

It was cold enough to freeze the you-know-what’s off a brass monkey.

I was particularly concerned about Golden Nuggets because I understand that his key attribute generates significant income for his owners, so you wouldn’t want to see them put at risk from the cold weather.

Or maybe a different type of cold is needed to freeze the you-know-what’s off a prize bull? I’ll have to Google that …

We got away from Chinchilla a bit after 9.00am and headed east towards Miles. We had initially stopped at the local Chinchilla Woolies to stock up on some essentials – cream, coffee, chocolate and toilet paper – but it was closed 🙁

We weren’t sure if toilet paper panic buying was a pastime west of Brisbane, but we thought we’d stock up anyway just in case. You can never be too careful.

But no dice. We would have to start a panic buying epidemic somewhere where the shops are open.

We left Chinchilla and the speed limits opened up to 110 km/h, but thanks to the old Victorians in the Winnebago ahead of us, we didn’t manage anything better than about 80 km/h for the first 15 minutes or so – well, at least until the first overtaking lane.

We finally got our essentials in Miles and then headed towards St George via Condamine and Surat.

Condamine is a pretty little town, with emphasis on “little”. A pub, a fuel station … and that was about it.

The roads all felt pretty civilised to start with … there were even lines painted on the road, and rest stops, and turning lanes …

… but the roads got narrower …

… and narrower 🙁

We originally thought that we were on the road less travelled, but that started to feel like the road to nowhere.

Of interest, drivers coming the other way were very respectful and pulled completely off the road when they saw us coming to allow us to pass safely. Needless to say that when we encountered a B-double coming towards us on a particularly narrow stretch, we extended the same courtesy 🙂

We were in no hurry travelling along these backroads, but we were probably going about 80-90 km/h when we were on the safe bits and you could see far enough ahead to ensure that there was nobody coming towards us.

The roads were pretty rough most of the way between Condamine and Surat. Not due to potholes or deterioration, but (I expect) because of the black soil underneath that causes the road surface to change and become quite uneven. After driving at speed for an hour or so, you start to feel like your internal organs have all been rearranged – hence the reference to “All shook up” at the start of this post.

There was one section of road where the road got very rough rather unexpectedly and while there was no danger, the van’s electronic stability control (ESC) obviously decided that we were out of control and so it kicked in.

I have to say that while it felt a bit surprising that the van suddenly wanted to slow down, it was a relief to know that the ESC works.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that the naming convention for roads in the west is pretty straight-forward.

Yeuleba-Surat Road.

Chinchilla-Tara Road.

Chinchilla-Kogan Road.

So when you have been travelling on the same road for some time, and you’ve seen no other vehicles and no road signs, the fact that you are on the Yeuleba-Surat Road gives you a feeling of confidence that Yeuleba will be at one end, and Surat at the other end.

Well, you hope so anyway …

OK, so I know that while we started at Condamine and at some time during that journey we ended up on the Yeuleba-Surat Road, we did indeed pop out the other end at Surat. Just in time for a late-ish lunch.

We stopped for a quick bite at a local Surat park, and then kept going towards home for tonight – St George.

The road from Surat to St George was nice and open, relatively flat and posted at 110km/h … and the scenery kept changing.

We arrived into St George at around 3.00pm.

Staying at the Kamarooka Tourist Park, St George for a couple of nights.

Spaces are all pretty small, but we managed to get parked and set up without catastrophe. Wade – the park manager – guided us in, stayed for a chat, and then scurried off to guide the next arrivals into their space.

One of the things that we loved about our last trip was the get-together with other travellers around the campfire – and this park was no different. Bring a chair and drink to the 4.30 campfire and we were served hot nibbles from their pizza oven.

They talk about there being 6 degrees of separation between people, such that just a few “friend of a friend” statements can connect any two people. We sat with a couple around the fire tonight – Dave and Mandy – and it turns out that Mandy’s sister works at Queensland Rail and has an interest in a couple of key projects that my team are delivering, and yet I have never (knowingly) met her.

Today we travelled roughly 340km over about 6 hours, and we managed to stop and enjoy the hospitality of some small country towns on the way.

One of the things that frustrates us when we get away for a weekend is that small country towns close at lunchtime Saturday, so it feels a bit like walking around a ghost town. Tomorrow we will be exploring St George on a weekday, which should be fun. We may even make a trip down to the famous Nindigully pub … but let’s wait and see what happens tomorrow.

Ciao