Bolting for the Border

Hello and welcome back to Macs With Packs!

The world has changed since we last wrote in here. Covid has spread its ugly feelers across the world, taking lives and impacting people in so many ways.

Obviously, we had to abandon our plans for overseas travel this year. Hiking in the Caucasus will just have to wait! We decided instead to head north to New South Wales and Queensland to get some winter sunshine.

Plans were made, accommodation was booked and a 4-wheel-drive car was bought to replace John's old car. We planned to leave on the 3rd of July.

Then covid hit Victoria - again. Suddenly we were the germy southerners and nobody wanted us crossing their borders. Qld put out a notice saying all Victorians had to be outside of Victoria for 14 days before they could cross the Qld border. Yikes! Suddenly there was a mad rush to leave. Then covid hit NSW at the same time as it eased off in Victoria. The problem now was that we had to cross through NSW! We followed the news intently the morning we left as we realised that we could get stuck in NSW when most of our bookings were in Qld. We looked at so many options that morning - should we head into SA then head north through NT then east into Qld to avoid NSW? Should we sit longer in Victoria to wait it out? In the end, we decided to bolt across NSW in one day. We cancelled bookings, and made new ones. What a crazy time!

It started raining the day we left and the rain spread right across the country. We drove a few hours to Moama on the Vic/NSW border. On the way we passed the first of the silo art I'd been keeping an eye open for. These artworks are amazing!

At Moama, we walked through the rain to dinner at the local bowls club and fell asleep in our room listening to the rain on the roof. Lovely!

The next day we drove about 1,000 or so kilometres to Bourke in northern NSW, and it rained for a lot of the time. It was a really interesting drive as we drove along the incredibly flat, straight roads through the saltbush plains that cover thousands of acres of outback NSW. The highway followed the old 'long paddock', the wide road easements designed for droving stock along. It was lovely when the clouds started to clear and we began to see blue skies.

We learned that this was an old Cobb & Co route. It was astounding to think that the old horse-drawn coaches used to cross this bleak landscape when there were no roads. They travelled at night when it was cooler. Looking at the scrubby bushes I can't imagine how uncomfortable it must have been for those inside the coach getting tossed around, let alone how hard the horses must have worked.

The highway was littered with kangaroo and tyre carcasses and we had one close encounter with a kangaroo. Further north, the roos were replaced by goats. They were everywhere! Clearly, they're much smarter than roos though as there were very few goat carcasses to be seen.

We also saw quite a few emus, something we don't see much of in the south,

We drove through a few towns without looking around. Cobar had an impressive setup at the entrance to town.

We tried to book accommodation in Bourke as we drove along but most places were booked. We found a room in North Bourke. Yep, North Bourke really exists! It consists of our motel, a pub and a few ramshackle houses with ferocious dogs tied up outside. It was a bit of a dive but it soon filled up with other travellers like us - southerners bolting for the Qld border in case it closed. That day they closed the border to Sydney-siders, so the next step would be all of NSW if it spread. We had a surprisingly good dinner in the local pub and slept like logs.

The next day we hit the long, straight road again and were pretty happy when we crossed safely into Qld. We were impressed with the long-range fuel tank on the Prado. We filled up with diesel in Daylesford Victoria and made it to Cunamulla, Qld on the one tank - about 1,400 kms!

Stay safe!

Heather and John