Linda & Pete's Travels 2021 - Central & Gulf QLD, Gregory, Savannah Way, Lorella Springs

I wound up staying with my mate Dave at Lightning Ridge for four nights. I did not want to rush home, after all, Sydney was in lockdown with an extension of that lockdown just announced. So on Friday morning the 16th of July I said goodbye to Dave and headed off. I was going home via Walgett, Coonamble and Mendooran to the Blue Mountains. I was hoping to get a better road than you do from Walgett to Burren Junction. Well I was wrong there wasn’t I! It was a very poor road to Coonamble. It was not good beyond there until I reached Gilgandra. It improved greatly from there for the rest of the trip home. I stopped for a cuppa about 62km out from Coonamble at a rest stop. I went onto Coonamble and fueled up there and stopped at a rest stop in town for lunch. Up the road from the rest stop was this silo art mural. Very nice. The Castlereagh River runs through Coonamble and I was about to be following the Castlereagh all the way to Mendooran where I was stopping for the night. The rest...

Monday morning the 12th of July I said goodbye to John & Sue who were also leaving and headed for Lightning Ridge via Collarenebri (Colly). It was a lousy road. But I had never been to Colly so that was the way I went. I arrived in time for lunch. I took a walk up the one main road and then had lunch. Colly is on the Barwon River which is quite a big river. There were a couple of info boards in the park. I then pushed on to Lightning Ridge to catch up with Dave. I am not doing any of the tourist things at the Ridge as I have done them before and what I have not done I will save up to do with Linda when we next come through. Therefore I am not worrying about any photos whilst here. There was a post I did on the blog for when I was there before with Jan & Ross early on during this trip. That post has photos of Dave’s and where we were camped.

Saturday the 10th of July I woke up from a good night sleep, reached over and turned on the diesel heater as it was a cold morning. The more south I go the clolder it gets. My plan was to stop at a free camp somewhere, perhaps Surat, and the next day move on to visit my mate Dave at Lightning Ridge again. We had visited him on the way up. I grabbed my phone whilst the van was warming up with the heater. Looked on facebook and saw that my good friends John & Sue were heading to the Boomi hot springs from where they were at St George. They would be there for two nights. I knew they were travelling as well. It was a bit over 430km or so. I decided to go there and after Boomi I would still go to Lightning Ridge to visit Dave. Gave them a ring and also got a tip from them on the quality of the road from Mitchell down to St George. It was a good shortcut they have used a lot so away I went. I stopped in St George for lunch, as I have done a few times now, opposite the Information Centre ...

On Thursday the 8th July I left Mary Kathleen. I was either going to stay that night at Winton or if I wasn’t feeling tired I would drive on to Longreach. If I made it all the way to Longreach that would have been a 580km drive. I would not normally do such a big drive but this is different at the moment. I have done all the sightseeing in this region and any areas that I have not done I want to save up for when Linda is with me. So I might take some alternate routes, such as going through Boulia, Jundah and Windorah on another occasion. So I drove on through Cloncurry, McKinlay, Kynuna and had lunch at Winton. I was feeling fine so I pushed on toward Longreach. All the way from Winton I could see storms all around me in the east. I thought for sure I was going to drive into a storm but I dodged them all. It occurred to me though that Longreach probably copped a big dump of rain and where I was going to free camp was the Apex Park at Longreach which is normally just a big dust bowl wit...