Day 75 (April 15) - Buxton

We had a bit of a sleep in at Buxton, but once we got up the first thing to do was work out where to pitch our van for the next few weeks. There were two other people camped on the same site as us, so one of us gave us some tips as to where to avoid. Apparently there are bad biting midges which are quite painful so he told us spots to avoid.

Our location marked with an X

We picked a spot a little way from the water, but on the flat and with the van shaded. The site looks lovely. It's part of a cattle farm, and this little corner of about 3-4 acres is right on the point of the main river and a tributary. In photos and on the map it looked the perfect location, because it's near the water and there are some islands nearby which the kids should like canoeing around. So most of the morning was relocating the van. Because we intended to be here for three weeks, we went the whole hog and set up all the outdoor tables and dishwashing setup we'd brought with us.



When we were preparing things for our trip we based it obviously on what we'd used on our previous trips, where we prepared all our meals and almost always ate outdoors. So far we've found we've used the cooking and dining facilities in the van, which has meant the two outside tables and outdoor dishwashing setup have been in the way. So it was nice to get these into position. We also set up the front end annexe wall we'd picked up from Adelaide on our dash back on Day 13.



The Isis River is about 100m away from our site, we're surrounded by bushland and it's very peaceful! There were kookaburras early in the morning and all sorts of moths, butterflies and ladybird-type beetles around.

After setting the van up we went for a bit of a swim, although found it was low tide which exposed very muddy riverbanks. While we could still manage to swim, the muddy sections weren't that pleasant. I guess this was the first slight indication things here weren't going to go quite as well as we'd hoped.

After lunch we went for a drive into the town of Childers, about 25km away. We needed to empty the porta potty and do some shopping. We stopped by The Peanut Van, which is a roadside stall selling a range of peanut products. The company is based in Kingaroy, in Qld. We got a few packets of roasted salted peanuts - Maple Bacon flavour, Sweet and Salty and Hickory Smoke, as well as some peanut butter. The prices were a little expensive, but at least it's local produce.

We also stopped at the Buxton General Store which doubles as a post office / supermarket / bottle shop / gas bottle refill centre etc... basically a great typical General Store! We've got a sample of one of our products we need to inspect so we made arrangements to have it sent here.

Later in the day when the tide was higher we all went back down to the river and explored the riverbank. There were various other forms of wildlife, and we found several of these little crabs. Bek and Jude also managed to trap some small fish just after dark. As night fell we had our first encounter with biting midges - they are tiny little black things probably only a couple of millimetres long but have such a nasty little bite.

-- Greg