Days 150 -151: Canberra to Gatton

DAY 150 Canberra to North Star Road Rest Area (35km south of Goondiwindi)

We got up bright and early at 5:30a - m for a 6am get-a-way.It was minus 2 degrees when we left and it stayed below zero for the first hour or so of our steady drive north.

There was quite a bit of fog in different places as the sun came up and We drove past fields of golden canola which Lorelle snapped quite a few times on her camera out the car window as we drove along.

Our first stop was Cowra just after 8am where we had a healthy brekky at Maccas. We then drove another two hours and got fuel at Dubbo. It was then another 90 minutes on that we stopped at Coonabarrabran for lunch - there were no suitable roadhouses so we went into the Chinese restaurant beside a servo and had an absolutely fabulous dinner. This was good because we now won't need much dinner.

We then just kept driving - Narrabri (topped up the fuel), Moree and now we are camped at a free rest area 30km south of Goondiwindi. The phone signal is almost non-existent but we can send & receive SMS.

Today we did 800 kilometres. All up it was a good day - although we were on the road until 5:30pm I was not tired as we had enough breaks and it was a beautiful day in terms of weather.

DAY 151: Rest Area to Gatton

We drove the 30km into Goondiwindi and had another Maccas breakfast - fast food.....

We arrived home without incident at 11:45am.

It will be strange going to sleep in our own bed! Maybe we'll sleep in the van for a few nights to acclimatise.....

We will add a few more blog pages in the next few weeks with facts & figures about costs and maintenance. Watch this space.

To all those people who are reading the blog, I hope you have enjoyed it - it has been time consuming - I've actually only read one book in the 5 months we have been away.
Although time consuming, it is worth it as we will have a permanent record of our trip which we can bore people with for years to come - we are also getting the complete blog (over 250 pages) printed professionally in colour.

Very soon we will start planning our next trip which won't be as extensive as this one. Some possible areas we want to explore include:-

# Western NSW - through Bourke, Broken Hill, Coober Peedy, Lake Eyre, Alice Springs, Uluru;
# Western Qld - Quiplie, Eromanga, etc.
# Tasmania
# NSW coastline north and south of Sydney
# Around Oz again to see the things we missed this time.