Day 52 (March 23) - Abercrombie River to Lightning Ridge

Our campsite at Abercrombie River was a lovely one! As mentioned yesterday, the road seemed to become a minor road, and the campsite was set back a little way from the road. This meant there was minimal interruptions from road noise.

We found on exploring our surrounds that the Abercrombie River was flowing slowly and was lovely and clear. The river itself is quite a long one, so saying we camped at the 'Abercrombie River' is a bit like trying to pinpoint a campsite by saying it's on the banks of the Murray! Our site was about 1/3 of the way between Curraweela and Gurnang.

The surrounds were lovely and peaceful and the water was definitely clean enough to drink.

We headed northwards and stopped for a leg stretch in the town of Rockley. There was a nice playground here which the kids enjoyed, and a surprisingly nice set of public toilets - they even had a full pack of spare toilet rolls in each side! Either they have no visitors and these were stocked up weeks ago, or the crisis is passing and people aren't so desperate as to steal them.

 From Rocklea, our next stop was Bathurst. It was lovely to be back here again - we last visited Bathurst during our 2017 road trip. We had numerous bits of shopping to do here - windscreen cleaning wipes from Supercheap, various odds and ends from Bunnings (there was talk that Bunnings may have been closed as of midday that day so we were moving fast, but it turned out to not be the case). We also printed out and laminated an Australia map at Officeworks, so we could draw in where we'd been on our three trips. We got the map from TAWK (Travelling Australia With Kids), a group we joined on our last trip. The main reason we joined TAWK was because some caravan parks offered kids staying free if you stayed there two nights. We haven't needed this at all on our current trip as we're not using caravan parks much, but the map was a good resource to be able to use.

120 grit 2-ply, anyone?!

While we were at Bunnings, Matt noticed one of the toilet rolls had been replaced with, literally, a roll of sandpaper! We have no idea who did it or why but it was a humourous slant on the current crisis, and making do with what you have!

We did various bits of shopping, refilled the van's water tanks at the visitor centre and had lunch.

On the way out we had to take a quick blast around the Mt Panorama race track! Being a public road when not in race use, it's something anyone can drive around. Again we did this last time on our trip, and it's fair to say the Pajero wasn't quite as stable around the twists and turns as the Commodore! But it was a bit of fun.

While in Bathurst we got confirmation that Queensland was going to close its borders at midnight Wednesday. At this stage it was about 2:30pm on Monday afternoon, and technically midnight Wednesday was about 30 hours' time (i.e. one minute after 11:59pm on Tuesday night). We weren't sure if this is what they meant, or if they meant 24 hours later at the end of Wednesday. But we worked on the assumption it was at the end of Tuesday so had to push quickly on. We wanted to have a day at Lightning Ridge to do some noodling for black opal.

Our track took us north through Orange, Dubbo, Coonamble, until we finally stopped about 11pm at a rest stop near Cumborah, which is about 60km south west of Lightning Ridge.

-- Greg