Day 27 Sunday 4/6/2023 Inverell to Tabulam, 9 – 21 rain threatening, rain.

We must cross the Great Dividing Range today. We follow the ridge east. It must be windy around here as there are a host of wind turbines. We slowly climb hill after hill and up onto the New England tableland 500 metres up. We stop briefly in Glen Innes which is known as the Celtic town. It’s cooler and overcast. Our stops in Glen Innes are always brief because it’s always cold as we pass through. As we head north towards Tenterfield the scenery changes to high country, spindly grey gums and tussock grasses and creeks that would best be described as brooks. There are cattle and sheep and towns with names like Dundee and Bolivia. Back in Gunnedah my head was spinning with the words of the poem My Country, now as we near Tenterfield the home of singer Peter Allen’s grandfather, all I can hear is “Time is a traveller, Tenterfield saddler …”

We approach Tenterfield and whiz past the beautiful historic home of tin miner John Reid, Stannum House. It’s 14 degrees in Tenterfield and we ditch the vans and hurry to a pie shop. How lucky we are that the first one we find is Kitchen Garden with the most warming and delicious pies, so good that in hindsight we wish we’d bought two each. Woody has lamb & garlic with red wine and mine is a mushy pea pie. The Kitchen Garden rockets up our Pie Chart to a respectable #2. Tenterfield is busy, historic buildings abound and we stop for a photo outside the Tenterfield Saddler.

Now it’s the Bruxner Highway though at this end ‘Highway’ is a bit of an overstatement. The road is narrow, bumpy and winding, and then the hills start as we climb up and over the Great Dividing Range. Winding and climbing, winding and climbing before dropping down to the town of Drake then Tabulam.

We have several options for the night, the first being Tabulam. We decide to check it out not realising that the campground is several kilometres out of town down a dirt road. The town is colourful and ‘in your face’ tropical and there’s no doubting now that we’re east of ‘The Divide’. Down the road, we go past grazing cows until we find the racecourse, gobsmackingly high on a bend of the Clarence River. It’s hard to imagine how high the last floods were but we can see the damage. There’s a well-mowed campground with power and toilets and we lock the gate as instructed on the phone. That seems odd. There’s no TV reception which is disappointing for Elle our media junkie.  There are a lot of people staying here in recently built accommodation and we assume that perhaps they’re flood victims. In the stables, there are tents for backpacker farm workers. But, frankly we don’t wish to seem nosy.

Rain starts as VeeWee and I walk over to the river escarpment. It is several hundred metres wide but the river itself is quite narrow as we’re still a long way from the sea. We have happy hour in Elle’s motor home ‘Betty’.

Dinner is lamb chops, spinach, broccoli, tomatoes, basil and red wine with Risoni as a tray bake which comes mighty close to those pies in flavour.

Accom: $15.00 unpowered

Fuel: $26.50 (1.869L)

Towing Kms: 226Kms

Only one dead fox.