16 May 2011 - Koramba Cotton, NSW

So happy to have my laptop back to working order. I who have always embraced a separate keyboard, am delighted to find this integrated one does not stick and therefore makes less mistakes! How clever!

We woke to 1 degree Celsius in the van, and were certainly glad that we had electricity. I had to clear ice off the windscreen before heading away, however after half an hour on the road, I had to stop and start peeling off my many layers of clothing. What a beautiful day it has been! But will no doubt herald yet another freezing night. I will be better equipped having purchased some winter jamies in Gundy today! Bit of a novelty but practicality first.

I traveled the route taken every other time; anti-clockwise through New South Wales and back through Queensland. The road as far as Boomi seemed to be lined more than ever with cotton fluff, so coupled with the icy temperatures, looked a bit like a snowy winter wonderland. Wildlife on the road from Boomi to Gundy mainly lay dead on the side. Sadly I passed one casualty where a smaller roo stood on the other side looking mournfully at the deceased before bounding away. Joyfully I drove for a few hundred metres with five roos bounding in a beautifully choreographed piece parallel to my path. That was quite wonderful! The road kill also included two foxes, close to each other; one unlucky, and the other too stupid to have learned by example. There was a lot of big cotton harvesting machinery on the road; very wide and requiring me to pull right off each time.

I dilly dallied in Gundy this morning so as not to put pressure on Dorchester Computing as they did the long waited for repair; shopping in the two cheapy shops (The Reject Shop just having opened late last week), the newsagent, the service station, the book exchange, collected some mail from the post office, called into the Retravision store where they found me a spare microwave ring hanging about in their spares and gave it to me gratis – and it fits. I popped into the Goondiwindi Food Co-op to see if they had a couple of items I knew that Coles BiLo did not stock and was very impressed with their fresh produce section, and so elected to return there closer to midday to do my big shop. Because of that I missed the fuel discount voucher, but then the reality is that I only saved $1.98 when I filled with diesel this morning. The pleasure of shopping in a superior vege and fruit store was worth loosing that amount.

My return was relatively uneventful. There was only one harvesting machinery convoy, but many many road trains and B-trains. Fortunately in the main the road from Gundy to Talwood is two laned and does not require one to pull right off the road when they pass, but you do have to watch the suck-in effect.

There was no road works between Talwood and home, so it was a fast trip at 80 k.p.h, until after the border when one hits the one kilometer of crater-like mess and I crawled the last leg home at no more than forty k.p.h. Road kill on the return trip was less, but included on the southern leg, two small critters that resembled dappled small piglets. I have no idea what they really were and did not take the opportunity to stop and photograph them for research purposes.

Now everything is unpacked and stowed away, and the dinner is ready to go into the oven, a change today from the slow cooker. I am doing a beef roast; another good buy from the Co-op. Just goes to show that one should keep an open mind when it comes to choosing one’s supermarket.

I learned a new word today, from a pamphlet on birds picked up in the Information Centre at Gundy. The literature speaks of Goondiwindi being ‘a place where streams merge into rivers before breaking out into a lazy inland delta of billabongs, anabranches and flood runners.” My discovery of the McIntyre’s alternative channel can obviously be described as an anabranch of the river. The Macquarie Pocket Dictionary says of “anabranch”: a branch of a river which leaves the main stream and either enters it again or dries up. Surely this would only happen in Australia?