Sorry we are a bit late....there seems to be no reception in the middle of nowhere!!

Day 1 & 2

It was a dark and stormy night…..well not quite. It was a dark and damp morning that welcomed us to our first day of the holiday. The toy moon (1/2 moon) was still in the sky.

We were obviously already in holiday mode, as we were running an hour late before we even began! We had planned to leave at 6am but ended up leaving at 7am. That meant  Klaus and Beryl (KnB) were an hour ahead of us. It had been raining non-stop pretty well for the last 3 days, so our vehicle, roof rack and boat prep were severely delayed until the last minute. That meant on Friday night I had to put the roof rack on, put all the gear in the rack, then put the boat on top, all in light drizzle. Then I had to pack the contents of the trailer. Fun was had by all !!

W tried to catch KnB for a planned breakfast at Maitland. Of course that never happened, and after speaking to them several times on the phone, being an hour ahead of us, it meant that even though we were travelling faster, it took until Narrabri (6 ½ hrs) before we met. After Narrabri it was a further 1 ½ hrs to our planned stop at Gil Gil Creek Rest area 40 kms north of Moree.

It wasn’t too bad of a spot, and we got there about 4:30 after 685kms from KnB’s house, and 643kms from Glenhaven. It was just a small area by the Newell Hwy that could comfortably hold about 8 or so caravans, plus us who decided to put up our camper and Marg’s tent in the long grass (and prickles) 30m from the flat ground.

I set up my camera for a 2 hr time exposure star shot as the sky was just beautiful, with pretty well no ambient light. We turned the lights out and went to bed at 9:10pm!!

Next morning, we woke up to -1 degrees of ‘coolness’. It was a tad cold. Marg had a bad night with the cold and she had multiple layers on. Wendy was cold as well, but I was ok – must be something wrong with me.  After a breakfast of toast and cereal, we packed up and were on the road about 8:15. First stop was McDonald’s in Goondiwindi for coffee and loo (#2’s). From there it was onto St George for lunch, then Surat, Roma (fuel), then Injune and finally to Carnarvon Gorge. It was a long day, as it was further than we thought. It ended up being 705 Kms. As was the case for the end of yesterday’s journey, the road was bordered by cotton balls that had presumably blown from the trucks or cotton fields. We stopped at one field that had some scraps of cotton still on the ends of some of the rows, and again up the road a bit where hundreds and hundreds of container-sized stacks of cotton were stored.

We arrived at Carnarvon gorge at 7pm and set up in the dark. Pumpkin soup was downed pretty quickly to prepare us for the cool night ahead.

Overall it was a quiet day as far as activities are concerned, but we did get to listen to a couple of ipod playlists, as well as get through nearly half of our first ‘book on cd’.   

Will send some photos when have more bandwidth...am using a very thin wifi pipe at Carnarvon Gorge