We packed up again – getting quite quick at it now. We were away by just after 9am. We had to backtrack east for about 50km to get to the ? hwy. we then headed south along that Hwy, our destination being Charters Towers. Initially we had not been planning to go to Charters Towers as it was a bit out of the way on our route. But then Mum reminded me that my grandmother (Nanny) had been born there and my Dad had attended a boarding school there for a few years. So I decided I would like to visit there. It was about 400km from Mt Surprise. It was obviously not a much used highway as it was quite narrow at times, with only single lane bitumen, so if we met someone else coming the other way, we would have to half drive off the road.

There weren’t many towns along the way, but we needed to buy bread somewhere in order to make sandwiches for lunch. We came into the town of Greenvale around lunchtime and found the general store there (basically a single room in a tin shed community building). I couldn’t see any bread, but asked and found that they kept it in the freezer ( presumably because they don’t get a delivery every day). I bought a loaf.  We found a nice grassy area with some shade trees and stopped there to make our sandwiches, although I wasn’t sure how we were going to defrost it quickly enough. Michael said it was easy enough to hook up the generator for a short while to power the microwave oven. This was the first we had used the generator ( many parks we had enquired about on the QLD coast didn’t allow generators to be used ). It worked fine and we were eating lunch in no time. The kids had a run around and kicked a ball and played some grip ball for a while. Then we we back in the car and heading south again.

We got in to Charters Towers about 3pm and rang some caravan parks and ended up at a Big 4 van park called ‘Aussie Outback’. They had a jumping pillow and a pool which the kids were pleased about. We setup – once getting quite quick at that. I needed to do some grocery shopping, so Michael said he would supervise the kids on the jumping pillow and playground while I did the shopping. The office at the van park had given me a map and directions to Woolworths.  I drove in to the town centre, parked and decided to allow myself half an hour to look around at some other shops before I did the groceries. We had read that the buildings in the town centre were impressive, and they certainly were. I walked up and down the main street for a bit and ducked in to a shop here and there. Then I went back to Woolworths and did a fairly substantial shop. Then back to the van park. I’d given instructions on dinner which was going to be sausages in the BBQ. Michael had just started to cook them over at the camp kitchen and Lauren had taken Hannah and Beth to have a shower. I whipped up a salad quickly and produced some ginger beer and ginger ale for drinks for dinner (had been on special at Woolworths) – this was met with great enthusiasm. We ate again at a table at the camp kitchen which we’ll probably try to do more often. Then it was bed time for the younger girls and  I did some more reading up on what to see in Charters Towers the next day. I figured there was enough to occupy us for half a day, and then the kids could have a swim and play the rest of the day.