The weather was still nice although not near as hot as we had experienced further up north. There was a nice walkway by the river into the town.
The town had a pub, a cafe called Deb's Cafe, an information centre and a little library. As we walked into the township we would pass lots of other campers and stop to chat. There were two couples travelling together that were from Tasmania and we struck up a bit of a friendship with them over the next few days. They had a huge fire going most days and had to go and get some firewood. One afternoon we headed to the pub and the boys were having a quiet one after collecting wood. We got chatting and we ended up staying for quite a while. Their wives came looking for them and were going to try and sneak off with the car without them knowing! Another time we enjoyed a coffee with them at Deb's Cafe.
We walked quite a bit around the town. There were lots of big kangaroos and emus around.
There was a beautiful full moon here and I just had to take a photo of it.
We both wanted to use our computers while we were there and we asked around the town if there was any free wifi. (We can use our hotspots on our phones, but it's good if we can use wifi for free.) We found out that the library had wifi, so we called in to check the opening hours. The lady there said to come back at 2 o'clock, as she was closing for lunch. We duly returned and sat on a couch, Randall doing some financial work and me doing my blog. The library was one small room and she was moving all the books and shelves so it could be repainted. It reminded me of the times I moved my school libraries from one place to another with lines of children passing books along!
We finished doing our work and headed back to camp. Randall bought out the bagpipes and drew a very happy crowd.
Our last night there we called in at the pub. There was a young bloke called Nigel there, and we noticed that he was rather keen on the barmaid from our previous visits. His mate was very under the weather and could hardly string two words together, Nigel not quite as bad. We knew he lived 10ks down the road from chatting to him, and there was not much in the way of traffic, but it was interesting to see how the publican seemed unconcerned that he was driving!
The morning we were leaving our toilet started playing up. We have a vacuum toilet similar to planes and it is closer to a real toilet than a chemical toilet. We always have a chuckle at people who traipse to the toilets at camp sites when they have their own toilet and shower in their great big caravan or motor home. It got really serious when it stopped working completely! We had to decide whether to continue on with our travels and stay in caravan parks or at camp areas with toilets, or buy a chemical toilet and put in the shower bay to use, and head straight down south to Hastings in Victoria, where there is a marine toilet specialist (lots of boats have vacuum flush toilets), who would look at it.
We decided that we would scoot down south as quickly as possible and maybe buy a chemical toilet in the next town. It was Saturday, and nothing is open in these country towns on the weekends. Randall spied a SuperCheap shop out of the corner of his eye in one town, and it did have a chemical toilet in stock. We asked if we could take it out to see if it fitted in our bathroom, and while we were doing that the toilet started working again. It makes a noise while its making a vacuum after each use. So we decided to risk it and not buy the toilet, and see how it went. We drove 1200kms over 3 days and 2 nights and arrived in Melbourne on Monday night. We booked in to have the toilet serviced on Wednesday and drove down to Hastings on Tuesday night.
It was all finished in a couple of hours. The blokes there called us out the back to check out the huge motorhome they were serviceing - it certainly dwarfed us!!
So, from being in Queensland on Saturday morning we were back down south in a flash and the holiday was over! Well, not really over, as we had lots of extra time with our family - our two girls, their husbands and their little sons.
We have had the most wonderful time, seeing places we haven't seen before and revisiting places we loved. We have enjoyed beautiful warm weather for over 10 weeks of the trip, and didn't see rain for any of that time.
Our motorhome has been wonderful and we both agree that for us, it is more comfortable and easier to manage than towing a caravan. We have camped in some amazing places and only paid for a total of 8 nights in caravan parks and we even managed to free camp in metropolitan Darwin for 2 weeks!
The picture below shows our trip and the places we stopped at. It looks pretty good!
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