Blogs from Warwick, Queensland, Australia, Oceania

We spent a cold night in Tamworth last night. We weren’t actually cold, not until this morning. We have a very good diesel fuelled heater with two vents in the van, but it is always turned off when we go to bed. Fortunately it heats the van very quickly. When Frank got up this morning the thermometer said it was 1.1 degree in the van and 3.4 in the fridge. No, we didn’t open the fridge to warm the van. When I checked the weather on my phone, it said that it went down to -2.5 c overnight. No wonder it was so cold. The water in our hose froze! Apart from being cold, Tamworth is a lot bigger than we expected. There is no shortage of motels, but seemingly very few caravan parks. I image ... read more

Wednesday 12th October - during the last few weeks we have been debating whether or not we would be able to get to Tasmania. We spent some time there 8 years ago and loved it. Graham has an old school friend who lives in Burnie and they have been communicating throughout our travels around Aus. Today, Wednesday 12 October, we took the plunge and booked our tickets for The Spirit of Tasmania ferry and will travel there overnight on Tuesday 3rd January 2012. It cost a bit more than we had anticipated and would not have been possible if we had had to rely on our credit cards. But a generous offer from David made an immediate booking possible and we hope to be able to return the favour when he visits the UK next year. ... read more

Friday 7th October – Once again the weather seemed a bit unsettled. It wasn’t actually raining but the clouds looked a bit threatening. We decided against a major day out and, as we had a few more domestic chores that needed doing, we thought we’d tackle those and perhaps have a walk by the river in the afternoon. So the morning was taken up with a bit of washing and a bit of shopping. The shopping included obtaining another round of tablets for Graham’s heart condition – the total cost was over $100 and, despite a so-called “reciprocal” health arrangement, we don’t think we can claim any of that back, although we will have another go at that. This makes the much criticized British National Health Service a major success in our eyes as, being over ... read more

Monday 3rd October - Today we thought we would head for Toowoomba and we were up and about quite early getting prepared. Without really trying we were ready to hit the road at 8:00am. There was nothing keeping us in Miles so off we went and within half an hour we were approaching the town of Chinchilla just 40 kilometers further on. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and we wonder now, following yesterday’s mishap with the power pole, why we didn’t crack on just a bit further to this delightfully named town. It’s considerably bigger than Miles and may have had a lot more to offer for our afternoon viewing and probably bigger sites to put the caravan on. But today we just carried on through Chinchila towards the next major town – Dalby. Traffic was ... read more

Saturday 11th and, alas, we woke up to rain which was quite persistent although not heavy. We needed to go the Post Office again so went into town quite early but we’d forgotten that Aussie Post Offices don’t open on Saturdays! Warwick is a great place with plenty of parking no matter where you need to go in the town so we were able to park close to the indoor shopping centre. I wanted to print off a few photos so we went into Big W where they’ve got a few handy self-service machines that you can print off whatever you want. I wished I had studied them before and then we might have come up with some proper photo cards to send but we are not as clued up as Sarah and Darryl – the ... read more