Our wake-up cups of coffee in hand we enjoyed the dawn watching the stars fade as darkness transitioned to yet another sunny blue sky day in outback Queensland - you can’t really get tired of it!
With a gentle tailwind behind us all the way we travelled, achieving excellent fuel economy, ~ 200 kilometres due W from Charleville to our next destination.
 |
| Small blue & white sign against a similar background can be hard to see when driving down the highway. Lucky they also have a bright orange caravan parked by the gate. You can't miss it! |
‘The Lake’ campground is located on a working sheep and cattle station just 4 km E of the town of Quilpie (pop~ 650). It caters to any style of campers ranging from caravaners wanting to park adjacent to the station house ‘Caravan Park style’ with connections to power & water with nearby showers and toilets, through to those that simply want to ‘bush camp’ and pitch their tent (or caravan in our case) away from station facilities beside the lake. Being ‘fully self-contained’, i.e.: our van carries it's own power (solar and battery system), water and toilet facilities, we chose an option that lay between the two book-ends and proceeded to set-up a nicely private camp (just us, the cockatoos at sunset, and the flies (all daylight hours)) on the lakeshore a couple of hundred metres away from the homestead.
 |
| We had a great campsite beside the lake |
Once we had made camp and unhitched the vehicle we drove straight into Quilpie to fill up the fuel tank and pick up some minor provisions (hot-crossed buns and chocolate - it is Easter after all!), before everything closed down for the long weekend (a typical occurrence in small towns on holiday weekends). As it turned out, there was no need to worry as there were two or three 24hr card-lock Fuel Depots used by long-haul truckers to choose from that never close down.
Being the Thursday before Easter and a lovely spot by the lake secured, we decided we would settle in and stay for 3 or 4 days. Being off of the roads during the long-weekend is generally a good idea too - not that it is very busy way out here over 1,000km from the nearest city!
As soon as we had returned to camp, out came the metal detector! Within seconds of starting her hunt Heather was cursing the flies. A minute or two later and she was back in the caravan to get her ‘bug-hood’ so that she could: a) see, and b) breathe without inhaling any of them! Not long after donning her hood a cry of joy as she had made a find! It was a Sterling Silver (92.5% Ag), Three Pence coin! Who would have thought there would be something to be found less than 20 m from our campsite?!
 |
| H in bug-hood found this 1943 Three Pence coin just metres from the van. |
On Good Friday, our camp hosts at The Lake, Sally and Mike, invited everyone on site (about 4 couples and 2 families) to join them around the homestead camp fire for a Sundowner (BYO beverage of your choice as the sun goes down) and some ‘Sun-dried Tomato and Olive’ damper.
Arriving about 30 minutes before the sun went down, we (and everyone else), were accompanied by our ever-present entourages of flies. It is tough to enjoy a drink while wearing a fly hood and hard to conduct a conversation without, so we reverted to chemical warfare! Liberal application of ‘Aeroguard’ kept the little blighters at bay until, with the arrival of darkness, some natural relief arrived and they (the flies) just go away! They must be scared of the dark!
 |
| Don't forget the Aeroguard and 'Avagood Weekend' |
The respite that comes with the setting of the sun and the subsequent departure of the flies, is however, unfortunately brief. In what could be considered a cruel quirk of nature for living things out here, the annoying flies are no sooner gone than they are duly replaced by a ‘nightshift’ of peskie mosquitoes!
When camping by water it has never been truer that you need to make sure that you ‘Don’t forget the Aeorguard’ in order to ‘Avagood Weekend!’. All Aussies will know exactly what I am talking about here as the two phrases above are a reference to some classic advertising for bug spray from their younger days and childhoods. The ads are now part of Australian popular culture.
OK, after that little tirade against bugs trying to make their living from our blood, sweat, & given enough persistence on their behalf, maybe, tears, I must say that the Sun-dried Tomato and Olive damper was delicious! We enjoyed it so much that I asked Sally for the recipe which she was good enough to provide. I will be giving this a go in the camp oven myself at some point in the future and will let you know how it turns out - might even make a video of the event!
In just two days and nights at The Lake we had almost emptied the can of Aeroguard that we had on board when we arrived so we made a stop at about the only store in Quilpie that was open on the weekend to get some more. With ‘bug security’ reinforcement now in hand, for our entertainment on Saturday we drove, sans caravan, about 100 km out to the town of Adavale as this was the location of the Adavale Pub to obtain the next signature in our Bush Pubs book.
 |
| The Adavale Pub, is listed 1st in our Aussie Bush Pubs book for no other reason than it's name begins with the letter 'A' |
 |
| Our visit to the pub made for a pleasant outing. |
We had a good chat with the publican, Koss, who, over a beer, and along with his signature, provided us with a bit of history about the area. He also told us that a book, titled ‘Kings in Grass Castles’ written by Dame Mary Durack and made into a TV mini-series, is about The Durack Family and how they first established a large land holding in the area.
 |
| Heather with Publican 'Koss' He is the 17th publican to have signed our book (so far). |
Sunday was a lazy day back at the Station. As we took refuge from the flies in our van we decided to watch the mini-series we were told about the previous day (good 4G network service allowed us to watch via YouTube). It was entertaining and a little disturbing in parts but we also learned a bit more about some of Australia’s pastoral history too.
All of the chat around the campfire that evening was all about the weather and the forecast of up to 75mm (3 inches) of rain for the district across Monday and Tuesday. Given the fact that Queensland ‘black soils’, unaccustomed to moisture that they are, get as slippery as clay (because that is essentially what they are), after just a couple of mm of rain, we resolved to be gone by 10am on Monday before it was forecast to arrive.
We were settling up our camping fees under cloudy skies and on dry ground with our hosts around 7am on Monday morning when somebody mentioned metal detecting and somebody else (hello Sally), let slip that ‘in the old days there used to be Chinese garden patches on the other side of the lake’. Too tempting an opportunity to resist for a Metal Detector, rather than hitch-up the caravan right away, we drove about 4km by road and then across a paddock to get to the bank on the other side of the lake (despite it being just 200m ‘as the crow flies’) directly across from our caravan, in order to ‘take a swing’ for an hour or so.
This time, wearing her fly-hood from the outset, Heather once again struck ‘pay-dirt’ almost immediately at the base of an old tree near the water’s edge. Two coins in the one hole! A 1949 Kangaroo Penny and a 1942 Kangaroo Half Penny.
 |
| With bug-hood in place, Heather found two coins in one hole! Above L) 1949 Kangaroo Penny, and R) 1942 Kangaroo Half Penny |
Then the fun really started… No sooner had we identified the coins than the first drops of rain started to fall. We scrambled back to the car and by the time we had got into it the rain was coming down heavily. We immediately set off back to camp. Despite the rain having stopped after just a couple of minutes, already the tread on the tyres of the ute were caked slick with slippery mud making it difficult to steer.
 |
| Mud quickly turned the chunky tread on our tyres into smooth slicks! |
Back at the van, we got taller with every step we took just moving around getting ready to try and leave. A couple of minutes of rain, dropping 2 or 3mm at most, had turned our campsite and the track into, and more importantly out of it, into a greasy clay slick.
 |
| The track into and out of our campsite had become a greasy slick in just minutes! |
Seeing what a mess a couple of mm of rain could make of the tracks, experiencing the lack of traction available to a vehicle on the wet clays, and with forecasters predicting over 25mm more rain to start falling within the next hour or two, WTF? - Where are The Farrows? needed to GTF! - Get The Farrows! outa there ASAP before the rain really arrived! If we couldn’t move to higher ground we would be stuck (literally) for days (again, literally!).
I openly admit that I was not sure if the ute would be able to gain enough traction to tow the van up the clay laden slope. We took some time, but not too much time (because it was soon going to start raining again), planning our way out.
The time had come to act. After letting air out of the tyres to improve traction, down to 20psi all around - ute & van, I selected Low Range 4WD to tow the 3 tonne van to higher and drier ground. As it turned out the ute pulled the combination out without much drama but we couldn't have done it so easily without lowering the tyre pressure first. I was very relieved! Now parked safely on high ground we re-inflated to correct pressures for the highway and down the road we went with dark clouds looming.
No comments:
Post a Comment