Townsville to Busselton (4 weeks)! sunday 18thSept - Wed 21st Sept

Left Townsville Sunday morming for Charters Towers as the Branch of the Church was having their conference and I had to give a lesson. Said a sad goodbye to Adam, Inly, Sam and Micah. I was the only one with tears.

We left there at about 1.30pm and drove along the Gregory Development Road (very boring) until we needed some more fuel in Belyando Crossing. We drove on to Clermont, where we stayed in a caravan park. This was just like a norwest caravan park red dirt everywhere but friendly people. Charles actually started a conversation with some people while we were making breakfast. We looked around Clermont (from the car) and then continued on, I can't see this taking a month can you?

We got to Emerald , which is not named after the lovely gem. We continued on until we got to Springsure,which was a little town you would normally go straight through, but we saw a museum and stopped. I have always been interested in the history of the Cobb and Co coaches, and this museum had all the history of the coaches that used to do the run in that area. It was a staging post and had some amazing old pictures of the coaches, the last coach did it's run in 1928 through the town. Also a great history of the wool growing in the area.

Continuing on we got to Injune and stayed in the only caravan park, it was good and had some lovely trees down the back, but guess what, that was all blocked off as the council had given the local mine 1/2 the park, including the campers kitchen which looked great, (through the fence), and they very kindly gave the park a bar b q in return, and a new ablution block. The showers were great which was all we really needed.

We went through Roma, again, not named after Rome, althoughh there are a lot of Italians there, it was the middle name of one of it's pioneers.


We continued on until we went over the border into NSW, then I got excited because Charles said we could go to Lightening Ridge, which is where my grandfather lived for a short while fossicking for opals. We were going to go to the artesian bore baths but it was really crowded and we didn't feel like being in warm water with so many people, so we drove down the road and managed to stop at an opal and pottery place for 5 minutes, saw a lovely ring but, lucky Charles, our pension didn't come into the bank until Wednesday. So even though it was our 45th
Wedding anniversary he got off lightly by saying "i would if I could."

I could kick myself for not taking a picture of the entry of the town,as proof I had been there and where my opals came from. We drove just out of town and found a nice layby and had some nice country butcher steaks and slept the night.



Q