Leaving Tamworth, we joined the Oxley Highway as we steered ourselves west. Our campsite tonight is just off the highway 12 km east of Gunnedah. It's known as the Redbank camping area and is beside the Namoi River. Its quite a large area with flushing toilets.
We backed in as far as we could to try and lessen the amount of truck noise during the evening but Ros unlike me is a light sleeper, so she was awake on and off during the night.
Once we had both had several hot coffees and breakfast out of the way we left just on 08:30.
Passing through Gunnedah just 10 minutes later had us now on our way to Coonabarabran. There are currently severe water restrictions here with showers limited to 2 minutes and no watering of gardens, so you just imagine how everything looks.
We wanted to photograph the water tower in the small town of Gulargambone with the most direct route taking us out through the Warrunbungle National Park. The load limit on the bridge just past the national park boundary is much lighter than our rig so we took a detour via Gilgandra to get our photo.
Where possible we prefer to take minor roads rather than highways so cross country we went for the next 86 km until we reached Warren. Here we joined the Mitchell Highway at Nevertire before reaching Nyngan.
It was so sad to see the result of the drought on the country we have been passing through. The irrigation channels around Warren were bone dry and where there are normally crops growing in the fields, now there is nothing. The strong winds we have been experiencing for the past two days are just blowing what topsoil there is away.
It was still quite early so we pushed north towards Bourke. We found a spot to camp 44 km north in the small town of Girilambone. It's in Wiki camps and a gold coin donation is requested for stopping in the local CWA park. They have one flushing toilet and shower.
Even though we didn't use these facilities we were more than happy to leave $5.00 at the pub to help with the upkeep. Over a few beers, the publican told us that the town was nearly out of water. Unfortunately, the towns bore water has far too much salinity and the council will now be arranging to install tanks at each house and have water trucked in. Of course, there will be a daily limit on usage.
The camping area as you can imagine after many years of drought has the occasional tuft of dead grass. The whole area was covered in prickles so thongs just weren't the go.
In the morning we shared the area with some kangaroos. I'm not sure how they are surviving.
We had planned to continue onto Bourke and do the top part of the Darling River Run as far as Wilcannia. But after seeing the result of the drought and needing to have our chine bar welded we retraced our route back to Nyngan and continued west towards Cobar. We are holed up in the caravan park with the temperature outside currently at 40 degrees and climbing. Our vans aircon is now down to 28 degrees and dropping.
Good luck with the welding, my experience is once its broken it will break again. I changed mine over to the flat bar 40mm x 12mm and i'm confident that the draw bar is so much more stronger,much like the axle stubs upgrade.
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