Noccundra

Spent our first night back on Qld camping on the creek near the Noccundra hotel. Thanks for the recommendation Paula S!! Spotless clean and quiet plus hot showers and toilets near the hotel all for free. Mind you we spent all our dollar bucks on dinner and beers in the pub instead! Very friendly couple running the place on their own, some great characters traveling thru there so very entertaining evening.. Basic food but heaps better then what's left in our food larder by now!! Beautiful sunrise from the tent this morning and we also found some more burrowing native bees which are intriguing. Not the best sleep thou as a couple with 6 month old twins were camped near us and one of the kids was screaming half the night. Poor kid was wide eyed and wired with exhaustion when we left the pub at 7.30 so not surprising. Hope they packed up and went home today rather then continue such a difficult road trip with such small kids. 

Drove to Thargomindah after packup and showed our border passes to the local policeman who does the rounds of the huge locality every day checking everyone is doing the right thing. Some very sparse lands to start with but got better as we got near town with heaps of flowering wattles and bloodwoods.

Thargomindah looked much bigger today then this time last year when we spent a night there after escaping the mud in Currawinya. Amazing how perspective changes. Cunnamulla felt huge a couple of hours later!

Sat in the park for an hour figuring out options for the next few days. The forecast for East and South of us is hot with possible severe storms and 90% chance of more then 5mm rain. Last year we got stuck in the mud/clay in Currawinya for a few days after a similar amount of rain so didn't really have the appetite to face that again. Plus we'd have to stock up on a week of food and risk being unable to drive out for a week which wouldn't be the best start back to work and school. Also thought about heading further north but that would add another 600-1000km to the trip and we're running out of steam after doing nearly 20000km over the last 3 months. Also thought about into Girraween or Mt Moffat but it's school holidays and a long weekend so everything within 6 his of Brisbane is fully booked out. We finally decided to call it a day and head for home .... Well kind of. We're going to intersect with dunks folks at Mitchell tonight, get their house key and stay at their house in Maleny for the last few days. Bit of a luxurious, gentle break in to busy East coast life again. 

So we're currently driving the 600km to Mitchell then camping with dunks family at Mitchell and driving 700km to Maleny tomorrow. But as anyone who has read any of our plans to now knows, by this time tomorrow that could have all changed again ha ha. 

Seen heaps of emu and lizards today plus good to be back in big tree land. Outback QLD is very beautiful, big black clouds fading behind us and blue skies ahead. 

PS we FINALLY saw a herd of camels today. We've driven thru 1000s of KMs of camel friendly desert and saw one dead one and today we saw about 30 in a group. Phew ice cream bet off!!