Day 102 – Friday 29th October 2021 – 758 Km

An early start is planned for packing & leaving, however, it is raining, so we take a bit longer as it is no fun getting wet when you are going inside & outside so much in the rain. We eventually get away at around 8.10am on the road towards Orange. It is raining all the way to Mungindi & we take things very easy, there is a lot of water over the road. We travel past lots of large wheat fields & cotton fields, most of the wheat is harvested. At Thallon we have a look at the wheat silos with magnificent large murals, there are lots of big wheat trucks lined up outside waiting to unload.  At Mungindi there is a police roadblock from NSW into Queensland at the bridge over the Barwon River that splits the town for Covid checks.

From Mungindi to Moree the countryside is very flat with more wheat & cotton & a few wheat silos at the small towns we pass through. It is now dry & the driving is a lot easier, as we enter Moree there is a big collection of horse floats outside the racecourse waiting for the gates to open. The bypass around Moree is welcome & we only stop at a few traffic lights. From Moree south the countryside becomes green and the land use turns to wheat crops & cattle grazing. The next big town is Narrabri & as we cross the Namoi River we turn off into the riverside park & eat the lunch that Tereza made this morning. It is good to stretch our legs as well as it is now around midday & we have been driving around 4 hours.

After Narrabri it is not long before we are driving through the Pilliga scrub, a very large remnant forest that has been preserved from land clearing. The next large town is Coonabarabran & we pass slowly through town & around 20km south of town we turn off the Oxley Highway towards Mendooran along the Mendooran Road. Here we turn left onto the Castlereagh Highway then Google maps take us down a small road called Cobbora Road. This road is bitumen for around 10km then it becomes dirt, good at first with a few potholes before becoming fairly rocky & there are not that many houses that we see.

Then we get a puncture & I pull the car up straight away, we are only travelling at around 50km/hr. I take the spare wheel down then get out the jack & wheel brace. I cannot shift the wheel nuts, they are stuck tight. A car coming the other way stops for us & asks if he can help, they live on a farm just a short way up the road & can bring some tools back if needed.  Then another car heading our way stops & offers to help, he has the tools, including a rattle gun for undoing wheel nuts. The rattle gun is large & powerful & doesn’t shift any of the wheel nuts. What now, he pulls out a long & large wheel spanner & stands on it, thankfully the wheel nuts reluctantly move & we get the wheel off. The puncture is so large that the stone is inside the tyre & has damaged the alloy rim in a number of places. To get the new wheel on we need to dig a small hole in the dirt road under the wheel then lever the wheel up with the shovel to put the wheel bolts on. This kind man then also helped pack the old tyre away & stayed with us as we drove on the dirt road the rest of the way to the bitumen road in case we had another flat tyre. All good & we waved him off as we turned onto the Golden Highway towards Wellington. Thank goodness this very nice good Samaritan came along.  No one else came along on the road other than these two cars all the time we were there.

It is 7pm when we pull into the fuel station in Wellington after 641km of driving & 11 hours. It is another 117km & 8.30pm when we pull into Low Ponds outside of Orange, the property of our good friends. They were worried what had happened to us.  The phone battery had gone flat so that I could not call to let them know where we were. They had waited on us for dinner & served up a delicious meal before we dropped into bed exhausted. It was a big day of driving, a total of 758km today. A tiring day.