Longreach Trip – Day 6 – Southwest Queensland

Day six was a shorter drive than usual.   This was largely because we are travelling through Southwest Queensland, a very sparsely populated part of the country.  There are only so many towns that have good accommodation facilities for our party.

We started in Tambo, to another very chilly morning.   Our party was only six cars, as one of our group had an issue with their accommodation and had to stay in another town.   Our first stop was Morven, for breakfast at the cafe there.   This was around 200km of driving.   We would re-assemble our full group at the breakfast spot.

The countryside was similar to what we experienced yesterday afternoon.   Mostly grassland with shrubs and small trees.   The road surface was very good, although quite bumpy, and given we were on the A2, there were a lot of road trains.   At one point there was four of them bunched up with some caravans, all from Halliburton.   It was quite the overtake to get around them.

There was one small town in the whole two hour drive.   This part of the country really feels very empty and the towns that are there are quite small.

We had a lovely breakfast in Morven, and refueled at the roadhouse down the road.   The roadhouse was very busy and full of road trains.   The road trains really are enormous, especially the triple and quadruple ones.   As they are not allowed near the cities, many Australians have not seen them, even though they are a core part of our economy.

After our fuel stop, our next point was Mitchell.   The road between Morven and Mitchell was pretty similar to our first leg, but there were more clusters of medium sized trees.     We stopped at Mitchell to buy some food and for a break, and walked around the town.  Our next leg would be 200km, and there is no town between Mitchell and St George.

After exploring the town we set off.   The road between Mitchell and St George, was paved, but a much smaller road.   The traffic was mostly caravans, and there were only a couple of road trains.   The countryside soon became quite wooded, with some farmland interspersed.   Due to this, there was a lot of road kill to be avoided.

The original plan was to stop for a break half way along this road, but there really wasn’t anywhere to stop.   The road was narrow and it meandered along the countryside.  Sometimes it was wide enough for two cars, and sometimes it was wide enough for one, and you had to put a wheel into the gravel if there was oncoming traffic.   Traffic was fairly quiet, but it did happen.

Dinner was at the local pub in town.

We arrived into St George two hours later and were quite early – 1:30pm.  We refilled the cars and then headed to our hotel.     Our hotel room wasn’t ready so we went for a walk around the town before we could check in.    After so many full days it was good to be able to take a rest for a couple of hours before dinner.

On this shorter day, we covered 504km.   There was no change to how the cars were performing.   The White 560SEC was going well with regular power steering fluid top ups.   The silver 380SEC and the petrol blue 280CE both had their idle issues, but we were doing almost no idling.