Rolling hills, trees, mountains, all typical of this area

As planned, today turned into a “transit day” more about making progress on our journey than sight seeing along the way. That’s not to say we don’t get the chance to take in the sights along the way, just that there are no specific points of interest.
That said we did actually stop in a couple of places along the way, the first one being a stop for breakfast in the first town we came across – Inverell. A nice Italian coffee shop provided both a mug of decent proper coffee and, for breakfast, we also had a slice of warm apple pie with cream… maybe not what you’d want for breakfast every day but very decadent and a great way to start the day 🙂
From Inverell we headed east to Glen Inness where we joined the New England Highway heading north. At Tenterfield we crossed the border into Queensland again for the first time since Cameron’s Corner. We stopped for a spot of lunch (coleslaw and cheese sandwiches, using up the last of the coleslaw) before continuing on to Warwick.
Most of the roads and landscape around here remind us of driving through the dales or the Lake District apart from the lack of dry stone walls. Lots of rolling hills and steep mountains and all very green. It seems like a really nice place to live.

A free camp site within 50 paces of a good pub that serves excellent food and beer – ’nuff said really.

Looking for a suitable spot to camp for the night we both started searching on WikiCamps and came up with the same spot independently – the free camp site at Nobby. This is a facility provided by the town and the only charge is for electric hookup if you want it. It is also within very easy walking distance of the Rudd’s Pub which is a bit of a bonus ! There’s an old public weigh bridge next to where we are camped, if I can figure out how to use it I’ll try and weigh the Land Rover tomorrow morning and probably scare myself silly with exactly how much it weighs with all the gear aboard…
The food at the pub is good quality, lots of it and not badly priced, they also serve Toohey’s New on draught which is one of our favourite Australian beers. There was some confusion over measure sizes of the beer again, another state, another way of measuring beer. In most states a schooner is the larger glass, just smaller than an imperial pint. A midi is about half a schooner so is just under half a pint. In SA though we came across a schooner that was the same size as a midi, a pint that was the same size as a schooner and an imperial pint that was the same size as, well, an imperial pint. In WA we found some pubs served pints, some schooners but all serves midis as the smaller measure. Anyway, it turns out that here they don’t have a midi, it’s called a pot. So now we have to add yet another possible way of measuring beer to the list. It’s a bit like Russian roulette ordering beer here, you never really know what size glass to expect and just hope it’s a big one ! On the plus side the cost of beer here is about the cheapest we’ve found at around $5 for a schooner of draft Toohey’s.
We have a very rough plan drawn up for the next couple of days and I think we’ve decided that Gladstone will be our most northerly destination in Queensland. Rockhampton is still a possible alternative but we don’t want to leave ourselves short of time for the journey down the coast and every extra day north effectively means at least 2 days by the time we come south again. Tomorrow we’ll head north on another transit day and see where we end up !