Day 75

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After a really peaceful night in a lovely bush camp called Oakey Creek Reserve just out of Bowenville we had breakfast and wandered down the road toward Oakey. We passed through the same area yesterday heading out to Dalby, but on the return track will take a bit of time to look around. Like a lot of these little towns, if you just pass through on the main road, little do you really see. By simply spending a few minutes exploring a few roads either side of the main drag it is amazing the different things you see and how you get a totally different feel for a place. Did a little shopping at the local IGA and turned toward Toowomba. Found a nice little park for lunch and a cup of brew, all be it a slow process caused by a near empty cylinder of gas, so the next stop was the local BCF ( Boating, Camping and Fishing Store) if you need gas on the track, these guys (BCF stores in general ) are the place to go. Very cheap for refills and they actually FILL the cylinders until you get vapour from the bleeder, something all to many no longer do in an effort to make a bit extra margin on the sale. The sky has been brewing over the last couple of days and now it is looking really mean. Only a couple of minutes down the road toward Warwick and the wipers were on. Our destination for the day is Leyburn and the 50 odd k’s roll under the wheels pretty easily. Passing through the locality of Felton along the way, judging by all the protest banners, it seems someone wants to turn the cropping land into another dirty big hole to pull coal out of. The camp ground at Leyburn is large and grassed, a really nice place. Very basic facilities, but very appreciative that the council is allowing us wanderers to have somewhere off the road to sleep without demanding we pay the extortion fees of some caravan park. That might seem to some as a harsh comment made by a miser, so let me explain our view on it. We have no problem with paying a fair price for a fair service provided, but at an average fee of $25 a night these days, in a totally self contained vehicle, to the point of even producing power for our own 240 V power needs, all we can extract from a park for that amount of money is a shower, and no shower is worth $12-50 each a day! It’s not too bad for a week or two on holidays, but when you spend 11 months a year on the road, it gets up around $8.5K a year to sleep and shower and that’s absurd. That is why we frequent very few caravan parks.

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