Old Bonalbo - Bedford Weir

Greetings from the fireside at Bedford Weir on the Mackenzie River. The galahs are flying around and chatting to Ella as she tries to feed them bottlebrush flowers. No takers as yet, but she is pretty thrilled with her pink feather collection! Marcus says he even enjoys washing up outdoors, so we may never return!

Although our mobile broadband connection is surprisingly good so far, we are having difficulties with the laptop battery and I have been unable to post blog entries, so I will backtrack a couple of days.

Our first day of travelling started on Tuesday 28th. Our early departure didn't happen as we had trouble with the caravan brake lights, so we had our first garage visit at Urbenville Motors, where the friendly mechanic interrupted his lunch to sort us out. Ella had only done 2 maths pages when we were back on the road and heading out towards Legume, on Australia's bumpiest road. After bouncing along at 40km per hour, morning tea quickly seemed like a good idea so we stopped at Wallaby Creek Road, and demolished Gran's scones in the company of bellbirds and wallabies!



Oh my God! An avalanche inside the caravan!


Just about everything that we had carefully packed had fallen out of the caravan cupboards, so we repaired the damage and limped along until the roads mercifully improved at Legume. Warwick was the next stop and we had a late lunch there after Ella tried her reading skills out on the graffiti on the park. Made for interesting lunch conversation!

We arrived in Goondiwindi in time for a feast that Nicolette had prepared. On Wednesday, the kids all went to the movies and then spent ages playing with the Labradoodle puppies.Thanks for the lovely visit Nicolette, Rowan, Eisak, Joel and Ellie!

We left Goondi on Thursday morning and the kids were absolutely thrilled to see 4 emus just out of town. Except for Ella, who missed them and spent 40 kms bemoaning the fact that she never sees anything! We drove through to Taroom and the Leichhardt Tree, where I chatted to a stock and station agent for a while. She said that trucks were still bogged around the area from the flooding in January, and properties that had been mustered by motorbike exclusively for 15 years had been mustered by horse this year. Poor horses! The mud is disgusting.  Late afternoon found us at our first free camp, a hauntingly beautiful site at Chain Lagoon, North of Taroom. The gloss was taken off slightly when we realised that there were no facilities at all there, but we had plenty of water and our lanterns were charged, so we stayed. Your "emergency toilet facility" from the staff survival kit came in handy Adriana and Sandra!!

We left the lagoon and stopped at the weir over the Dawson river near Theodore for morning tea and photos. The kids like the photo on the left!

We occupied ourselves counting coal trucks on the huge trains at Bluff - a disputed count of 96! -  and then drove through  Blackwater to the Weir, arriving in time to set up camp before dark. Our camp spot was 7m underwater in the flood!



Jackson pretending he caught this redclaw!



We have spent the last couple of days here at the Weir, the boys have enjoyed some fishing and we have all had some down time.

The rest has been very welcome since Dave's back has been sore and he has been struggling with both driving and being a passenger (and NOT because of my driving!). We had hoped to play a bit of music, but I sliced my finger open and can't play anything, and our lanterns have all run out so we have had no light. One night of looking for lost picks in the grass by torchlight put us off. Lachie lost his mandolin pick, then Dave dropped his guitar pick, and finally Ella dropped her ukulele pick and was crying, so we all stopped to look for it. Her description? "It's down there in the grass and it's grass coloured"!

We will pack up on Monday morning and head further North if Dave's back is OK.

Stay tuned ...