Wandering southwards again

    

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We spent three days at Ipswich, visiting the Railway workshops Museum - Excellent! very modern display methods and interactive stuff for the kids. Sunday morning a country market set up near us in the showground where we were camped so lots of good food bargains and stuff to see. We had to leave early Monday morning as the  circus was moving in on us so we ran away from the circus. We met a couple of fellow travellers who do signwriting so now the bus has some decoration.

    

At a lunch stop this Willy Wagtail cleaned all the bugs off the stoneguard



The road from Ipswich took us up over the Dividing Range for the third time and we knew we had a climb ahead of us as the signs said Cunninghams Gap as we approached the ranges. They also said 8% grade for next 7km. The highway was good with a passing lane most of the way up so we didn’t hold up faster traffic. However as we got towards the top we caught up with all the other traffic at some major roadworks. The road was down to one lane, one way at a time as the rest of the road appeared to have fallen off the edge of the mountain. There were several kilometres like this and in one place a double height row of shipping containers to stop the mountain falling on us! Then we were over the top onto the tablelands and heading for Warwick.
Straight through Warick and on to Goondawindi for 3 nights then back to Moree for another soak in the hot pools. This is all very flat country, growing wheat and cotton - lots of cotton - there is enough scattered down the sides of the road to stuff dozens of mattresses.

We are now at  Tamworth, the Country Music capital of Australia and in a couple of days we'll head west to join a group of motorhomes travelling the outback for about 6 weeks - can't wait!