Well, today was an adventure. It started off slowly, as we didn’t do anything until ten. We left with our caravan to go to Rolleston. There was water over the road at only one point on the highway, but it was so shallow it was not a problem. When we got to Rolleston, we booked a caravan park for the night and left our caravan there. We had lunch on the road to Canarvon Gorge. Soon the road became dirt. We headed along this road until we came to a line of cars that had stopped because there was water over the road. There was a Land Cruiser, a Mazda 4WD and a Subaru Outback. After seeing some other cars go through from the other side, we went through. Each on of them made it though, and our car did it very easily. We kept going for a little longer until we came to another creek we had to cross. This one took about half an hour, since there was a Honda Jazz that had stalled in the middle. Luckily, the guy with the other Land Cruiser pulled him out. We had to take some of the people who had stalled up to their campsite. We finally got to the start of the walks, but it was already 2:30. We found out that the main track had fast flowing water over it, so we had to do the smaller tracks. We got two and a half of them done. When I say half,I mean we stopped halfway through the longest one where there was a bunch of stones and the creek had widened. Here I attempted to teach Hannah how to skip a stone, and a almost broke my old record of 10. We walked back to our car and began driving back to Rolleston. The first one was lower than it was in the morning. The second one was faster, but we made it through. The guy on the other side who had a Prado, crossed over after us. We got home at 6:30.

Today we packed up the caravan and headed to the stockman’s hall of fame. Here we stayed ’till eleven o’clock, then headed toward Emarald. As we started coming towards Emarald at about 3:00, we didn’t have anywhere good to stay, so we went south for another hour and we are staying the night at Springsure. This also means that we don’t have as far the drive to and from Carnarvan Gorge tomorrow.

Today we didn’t leave Longreach! We spent today at museums and NOT driving. In the morning we went to the QANTAS Founder’s Museum. We got a tour of a 747 and a 707, as well as going through a bunch of gallery’s and stuff. We came back to the caravan for lunch before heading out to the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. There we got to go around and look at the things that the stockmen used and lived in. Tomorrow we start heading East, towards Canarvon Gorge, then we head up to Mackay and North up the coast from there, to the Whitsundays!

I got up at about 7:00, had breakfast and got ready to get back on the road. We wanted to get to Longreach by the end of the day. That was about 515km away. Our first stop was Blackall. Here we saw the black stump, so now we are officially beyond the black stump. We next stopped at Tambo and had lunch. We got to Barcaldine, where we saw the Tree of Knowledge. We headed to Longreach, which is just above the Tropic of Capricorn. So now we are in the tropics! We’re not driving anywhere tomorrow so we don’t have to pack up our caravan.

I got up at about 7:30, mainly because I wonted to get a decent last sleep in my own state. We didn’t leave all that early (9:30). We drove until 11:45 when we crossed into Queensland. I was pretty happy that we were finally in Queensland. We did a lot more driving yesterday, and made it to Charleville. We went to a place called the cosmos centre and saw some really awesome thongs (like Saturn)through telescopes. We have another whole day of driving before we finish our driving spree. Tomorrow we will be driving to Longreach, RIGHT in the middle of Queensland. We’re gonna stay in Longreach for a bit, then head east.

I woke up at about 6:00 this morning, lay in my bed trying to preserve body heat until 7:00, and turned on our improvised heater (it was -4 degrees outside). We got back on the road at 9:00 and got ready for a big day of driving. We reached Dubbo at 10:00 sharp. We stopped for a heater that doesn’t use gas and that can work in Arctic temperatures. By the looks of things, we should reach Cunnamulla (south Queensland) at about three this afternoon. After that we should be able to relax for a bit instead of driving all the time. Our plan is to get more than 1000km away from Canberra. We should just be able to slowly work our way up central Queensland and then cut across to the coast in about a week’s time, seeing all the towns that we haven’t seen before.

Well, we had a little problem about 22km past Dubbo. The net that was holding the stuff on the roof rack broke. Our travel keyboard came off and just managed to land on the crossbar of the caravan. It was alright, but we had to go back to Dubbo to get a new net. So we wasted about an hour on that. We had also lost our little guitar (for good). So we didn’t get into Queensland today, but we’re about an hour and a half away, so we hope we can start catching up on the time we lost leaving late. I’m writing from a place called Byrock, and it is pretty warm here. It feels really good going from a sub-zero climate to sub-tropical one.
It doesn’t feel at all like we’re gone for a long time, because this place feels just like home. It feels like we are only visiting northern NSW for a week, or even a weekend.

Hey there,
It sounds hard to say goodbye to your home for five months, but it is surprisingly easy. Only I know I’m really gonna miss it about three months in. Anyway I got up at 9:30 this morning mainly because I wanted to get an extra-long last sleep in my own warm bed. I ate my breakfast in peace, by myself mainly because everyone was buzzing around the house like it was just an ordinary day. Except that it was a Wednesday and everyone was home.(Which is not normal.) So we spent most of the morning cleaning up and doing last minute preparations. We got some photos of us in front of the caravan, all loaded up and ready to go. We finally got on the road at about 3:30. First we went to school to give the keys to our house sitters. We dropped some books off at the library and set off for Yass. I felt really excited that we were finally off even if we had delayed it for a few days. We didn’t stop until about 7:00 when we got to Cowra (think size of Cooma) to stop for dinner. We got straight back to driving. I entertained myself by singing the “Song that never ends” for half an hour straight. We stopped at Molong for the night, so this is where I’m writing from. We set up camp pretty quickly, but our heater doesn’t work in such cold temperatures, so we just ran the gas stove and that did the trick. We hope to drive for most of tomorrow and hopefully get to Queensland. I’m pretty sure we started out on the right foot here.

Hey there,

I made a mistake yesterday. It turns out that yesterdays post was actually the day before the day before day one. This is the day before day one.

I’m feeling quite a bit better now. So today I still don’t have much to talk about but we are going to be leaving early tomorrow so I’ll try to put more interesting stuff up tomorrow.

Hello everybody.

This is the day before the day that we leave. I have been pretty excited about leaving, but I have been sick and that had kinda been a let down. I have been reading and lying down. So as you can see I am just dragging this out. So I guess this is the end of the first blog post.