Day 4 was another day of lots of driving. We got away from Charleville a bit later than we should have – but I let Michael sleep in a bit, knowing he was getting tired from the driving. We had some DVDs on iPads for the 2 younger girls to watch if they woke up early – and had earphones for them so they didn’t disturb anyone else. Bethany and I got up around 7am, but the others (including Hannah) slept longer, which I think they needed. I did a bit of grocery shopping in the main street of Charleville while Michael took the kids to a park. It was nice experience the relaxed shopping in the main street of an outback country town – I visited the IGA, the bakery and the butcher – and there wasn’t a shopping mall in sight. The others picked me up from the side of the main road, I loaded the groceries in the caravan fairly quickly, and then we were off, heading towards Blackall. It was the usual drill with schoolwork again once we were on the road. Lauren and Sam weren’t too happy about how much schoolwork I was asking them to do, but Michael and I both reminded them, it was best to get it done while we were just sitting in the car for long periods as we wouldn’t be doing as much once we were out and about sight-seeing. And they weren’t able to do much more than about an hour’s worth anyway, as we couldn’t acces their maths on the CD ROMS yet.

At Blackall we stopped at the monument to the “Black Stump” – early surveyors in the region used the stump to sit their equipment on to read the stars etc. The colloquial saying “beyond the black stump” seems to be traced back to the stump here at Blackall – everything west of Blackall was “beyond the black stump”. We also briefly stopped for a photo of the monument to Jackie Howe – the shearer who set the world record for hand sheep-shearing. In ? he sheared 325 sheep in 8 hrs ? mins.

Next stop was at a little village called Tambo which is an the Barcoo River and it has a lovely rest area and picnic spot near the river. We had lunch there and the kids rode their bikes and had a play.

Then it was back in the car for another hour’s drive to Barcaldine. I drove this stretch (the first time I drove during this trip – Michael wasn’t as confident of my driving with the caravan in tow – but since it was mainly such straight roads, and he relished the rest, he passed it over to me. I think it was about half an hour before he started to relax though – still, I’d rather he was on the cautious side than being too overly relaxed about the care needed when driving with a caravan.

At Barcaldine, we got out for about 20 mins to see the site of the first artesian bore which successfully drew water in western Qld. And just outside the train station is a memorial to the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ – a tree which marked the site of an historic gathering of discontented stockmen and pastoralists in ? – they were unhappy with wages and conditions – this gathering was the beginning of what became the union movement and ultimately the Labour Party. It was a very unique kind of memorial – the stump of the original tree was still in place, but surrounded by glass pavers in a way that you could see the roots underneath. Hanging over the tree, making a type of roof canopy, a whole lot of timber reeds, forming an interesting pattern.

Once again, back in the car, and this time headed west for the hour’s drive to Longreach. It was going to make it a late setup, but we really wanted to get there, so we could set up and stay there for 2 nights. We arrived about 6.15pm, Michael, Lauren and Sam set up while I drove the couple of blocks to get some pizza for dinner. This was dutifully demolished and then Hannah and Beth had quick showers and off to bed, followed not too long after by the rest of us.

Well, having written my first post for this blog 1 week before we were planning to leave, I haven’t got back to do any more blogging or learning about the site until now. I’ve been just too busy working on all the final details of getting away. Lauren and Sam have been enjoying putting up posts during that time, and I think they’ll end up posting more often than me – that sounds like a good arrangement – you’ll get more regular updates on our travels than if I was the only one posting – and I’ll probably write every now and then a summary of the week or so from my perspective.

The packing up process was an exercise in patience and perseverance (maybe preparing us for the trip!). We had planned to leave 2 weeks after Michael started his long service leave. The first week of Michael’s leave, we found a rat had eaten a hole in the inlet to our Landcruiser’s fuel tank (we’ve since heard there is a rodent plague in much of Australia this year) – this meant it had to be in at the Toyota service centre for over a week – we were blessed that it was only a week as they were able to find a replacement fuel tank in Australia and not have to order one from overseas. However this meant that many of the jobs Michael was planning for that week (like getting the cars serviced, getting a roof rack fitted and rigging up a bike rack) had to be delayed. He used the time to get some building jobs around home finished off (which he’d been wanting to do). But we knew we would have to adjust our proposed departure date because of the delays. We figured 2 or 3 days wouldn’t make a big difference. The only thing we had booked for our trip (and that only happened in Michael’s first week of leave) was booking the dates to do a bare-boat yacht charter at the Whitsunday Islands. We decided we shouldn’t need to change this – we would just have reduced time in central southern Queensland and have to see those places a bit quicker.

I wasn’t sure how the kids would respond to having to leave later, but they were great – the older 2 seemed to understand why and pitched in to help more where they could, and the younger 2 (who are much more short-term focussed about everything still) saw it as school holidays come early – so play more at home! Well it wasn’t all play. I saw it as an opportunity to adjust them to the schoolwork they were going to do with me. (Lauren has been homeschooling since the beginning of this year and Sam finished up at school a week earlier than Hannah and Bethany – so I already had sorted their homeschool materials – which they kept working on in between doing jobs to help us). So I was able to start using the curriculum the teachers had given us for maths and spelling with H & B. this proved very useful, as I ended up photocopying some things and remembering to take some things that I otherwise would have forgotten. The extra 2&half days that Michael needed to do all his bits, gave me a bit of extra time to finalise curriculum and resources and also to organise some areas of the house that would have otherwise been – well, less organised:). It also gave me time to type out a more detailed information sheet for our house-sitters (which I knew I would have appreciated had I been in their shoes). Having said all this, I was still up until midnight the last couple of nights, and it still felt like a rush right at the end. It had got to about 2.30pm on the Wed afternoon (the day we thought we should definitely be able to leave) and Michael had attached the bikes and was fairly happy with how the things were secured on the roof rack. I had almost everything in the caravan, after what seemed like a hundred trips in and out in the last couple of days – but there was still a couple of piles I had been hoping to sort better before taking them out to the van. It was either “we leave now and be able to put in 4-5 hrs driving, or we might as well stay at home again tonight” – so those couple of piles (mainly books and notes for family time stuff) got whisked into the van (“I’ll sort them in the next couple of days and post things back if we don’t need them”).

And then we were “away at last”

Andrea

Well it is now Friday morning and I’m sitting at the dining table in our caravan in peace and quiet looking out the window at the landscape around our campsite. There is red dirt amongst the semi-arid scrub. I wasn’t expecting to see red dirt this early in our trip – but I guess the ‘red centre’ includes inland areas of NSW and QLD also.

After leaving Canberra at about 4pm on Wednesday afternoon, we drove straight through to Cowra, arriving there at 7pm and had dinner at McDonalds (not something we plan to do too often, but necessary on this occasion). It was cold getting from the car to the building and back again. We actually ate in the car as we wanted to keep going. We had decided to drive through to Molong and had rung ahead that afternoon to book into a powered site. The website had indicated there was a payment per person which added up to about $50 for our family, but when I rang up, I was told it was just a standard fee of $19 for a powered site – we were happy with that. We arrived about 9pm and were set up within 10mins (what we loved about this caravan) and then had Bethany in bed and asleep within 1 min. However, as the heater in the van does not work below 4 degrees C, we couldn’t use it – so Michael came up with the idea of turning on all the gas burners on the stove for a while. We warmed ourselves there while heating up the kids’ sleepy bears in the microwave. Then we pretty much all went to bed. Hannah came to our bed in the middle of the night saying she was cold, and then Bethany came a few minutes later. This was one night when Michael and I didn’t mind having them in bed with us, as 4 bodies squashed together produced good body heat – both Michael and I slept better after they came into our bed. We awoke around 7am and put on the makeshift gas burner “heater” for a while. I made porridge for everyone and then we packed up as quickly as we could so we could get into our warm car which had a heat that worked. The frost on the ground outside was quite thick – it was probably about -4 degrees overnight.

After about 20mins in the car we were able to start taking off beanies and feeling our toes again. Dubbo was about an hour away and we stopped there to do some errands, then continued north along the Mitchell Hwy. About 15 mins out of Dubbo, we heard a thud and Michael saw in the rear view mirror that the keyboard which had been on the roof rack had slid off. We stopped and found that it had landed on the caravan crossbar and hadn’t been damaged – good news – but the bad news was that we then realised the guitar in its case was not there anymore. The netting strap had broken and we weren’t sure how long ago. We decided to drive back to Dubbo to get a new net from Bunnings and to see if we could spot the guitar on the side of the road. We achieved the first, but not the second. Someone, somewhere in this area will find (or may have already found) a guitar which will almost literally have “fallen off the back of a truck”. We will probably end up buying another inexpensive guitar as Michael, Lauren and Sam all play and we had wanted to use it around campfires.

Having had our patience and perseverance tested again, we continued along the Mitchell Hwy through Nyngan and decided we should be able to get to Bourke by 5pm and stay there overnight. About 20km south of Bourke we came upon the town (although it is more like a village) of Byrock. Our Camps Australia guide told us there was a powered site campground there, which was run by the owners of the hotel – the main building in town. We checked it out and found it was only $20 for the night and was in a quiet but ruggedly picturesque setting, so decided to stay there. There was the typical friendly kelpie outside the pub, which Bethany made friends with. Since there was still an hour until sundown, the kids were able to have a bike ride around the flat red dirt, even riding off along a dirt trail for a bit. It was nice to be in warmer climes and we didn’t need to run the heater at all (even though it would have worked this time). We got to bed earlier than the previous night and had a good night’s sleep.

Then I sat at the dining table the next morning while others were still snoozing and looked out the window at the red dirt, enjoying the peaceful location….