Day 92 Thursday 26/8/21 Moura to Theodore, bright sunshine

Woody does a lap of the town before breakfast.

I find myself singing as I wash the dishes, being on the road must be agreeable. Even drying the hair on my hands and knees on the floor in front of the diesel heater because we haven’t got power. We had put an extra doona (duvet) on the bed last night. Inland nights are so much colder than the coast. The road traffic was heavy but not annoying.

We take the Moura Theodore Road the one beside the park, there’s a sign to the cotton ginnery and cotton balls line the roadsides. We drive for 40kms with open cut mine on our left and hillocks of mine tailings before driving through a tunnel that brings us out to farmlands, dry cattle country and grain fields. After the green of Victoria we are wondering how anyone can coax crops to grow here when suddenly rice paddies appear and we’re at the convergence of two waterways.

Theodore is a pretty town at the junction of the Dawson River and Castle Creek and it’s easy to pick the areas where flooding occurs by the height of the houses and boy some are high. At the centre of this very rural town is a rather upmarket fashion and homewares store and Elle bolts in there like greased lightning. By the time I make it through the door she’s in deep discussion with the proprietor and matching a lovely vase to a mirror that she saw 7 weeks ago. In fact, she’s had her fingers crossed that it would still be here.

The local showgrounds are large and obviously popular with grey nomads like us. There are no new flash rigs here. We have pleasant sites under a line of trees. The bathrooms are rather pretty bordered with potted petunias and someone has made a point of supplying 3 ply toilet paper. Which I might add, has El Prado near jumping with delight.

One of the joys of camping at showgrounds is that you never know what you’ll find. Sometimes you’ll be lucky to see a chook competition or a sports event. There’s not much going on today but wandering about the grounds I come across a restored 19^th century German wagon, a cattle crush (handy when you have a cow that needs tipping over) and crawling across some dry ground an unusual gourd. About the size of a kiwifruit this spiny little fruit when cut smells and looks like a cucumber. No, I didn’t try it.

Now that we’re back in dry country apostle birds bounce and chatter about and prickly pear is growing in the scrub. It seems that we’ve swapped mozzies for dry skin and boogies, in fact I feel like I’ve got half of Qld jammed up my nose.

Accom: 20.00 (power, water, toilets, showers, dump point)

Towing Kms: 46Kms (phew, that was a big day)