Another day on the road, no rain yet but the clouds are lingering
A long day today as our anticipated transit day turned into a 496km journey, mostly in a northerly direction. We tried to stay off the highways as much as we could as it’s a lot easier to set your own pace that way and you get to see places a bit off the beaten track.
We nearly had a stop in Oakey this morning as there are signs for an Army Flying Museum which we thought sounded interesting. After a bit of a trek off the main road following the sparse signs to the museum we finally got to the gate to find it closed – it’s only open for part of the week and they haven’t considered adding that information to the big advertising signs on the highway !
Anyway, other than that diversion we made pretty good time and finally got off the main highway at Dalby, finding the driving on empty roads very relaxing after the traffic on the highway. There’s nothing more off putting than a road train sitting on your rear cross member for mile after mile. Our average of 90km per hour is good for fuel consumption but at least 20k slower than the road trains.
On arriving at Mundubbera we stopped and had to make a decision on how much further we wanted to travel today and where we’d stop for the night. In the end we decided to push on a bit and stop at Cania Gorge as both camp sites here get good reviews. We chose the one with Telstra reception in the end, a nice quiet spot with a few walks we can look at tomorrow morning.
Feeding the local parrot species. The Lorikeets are pretty fearless, the Cockatoos wait until you move your hand to them.
On arriving and checking in at the site we were told about their bird feeding regime where the local parrot species are fed daily. Huge numbers of Lorikeets, Cockatoos and Galahs descend on the feeding area and will perch on anyone with bird seed in their hands. I’m not overly keen on this type of feeding that encourages contact with humans in this way but I admit, I couldn’t resist ! Just like the birds on our feeders at home, most of the seed was discarded as they searched out the sunflower seeds.
We’re almost at the most northerly part of our trip into Queensland now so I expect that tomorrow, after a walk in the gorge, we’ll start heading to the coast somewhere near Gladstone. We can then commence the much slower return leg down the coast to Sydney. We’ve booked into Lane Cove caravan park (where we stayed for our first couple of nights of the trip) for the last 2 nights of the trip. That means we have just under 4 weeks to get there.