Driving Part of the Country Way

First thing on the agenda today was to try to print out our early voting forms that we’d had sent to us via email so we can have our vote count in the upcoming Victorian election. The park owners allowed us to use their computer, and we managed to print out mine, but not Gadi’s.

We had a couple more things to see in town, so we packed up ready and then went to see the statue of Mary Poppins. Author P L Travers (Helen Lyndon Goff) was born in 1899 in Maryborough and emigrated to England when she was 25, where she wrote the much loved Mary Poppins series. Walt Disney famously spent 20 years trying to convince P L Travers to sell him the movie rights, which she eventually did, and its said she hated the resulting movie. The 2013 movie Saving Mr Banks was about Disney’s struggle with Ms Travers.

Next stop was the national trust held Brennan and Geraghty’s general store, established in 1871 by two brothers in law, remaining in the same family for 101 years until it closed its doors in 1972 with over 50,000 stock items still on its shelves as well as many years of ledgers and records meticulously recorded by hand. Walking though the shop front, original office and the two store rooms behind is like walking through a time warp, with many well known brands, old tins, glass bottles, hessian sacks and boxes of goods displayed as they were when the store was open. In those days there were no use by dates on goods so some products date back to the 1890s.

And now it was time to say goodbye to Maryborough. We hooked up the caravan and began our journey for today along a small part of a longer route that is known as the Country Way; the entire journey takes you from Rockhampton in Queensland’s north to Sydney in NSW.

We made our way through cute little country towns, stopping in Goomeri for lunch at the bakery and then Kingaroy to check out a local lookout (not so exciting) and the local peanut van as Kingaroy is the peanut capital of Australia, with two large processing plants and the small 50 year old family run peanut van, which sells flavored peanuts. We tasted a variety including smoked, salted, honey, honey and ginger and ended up buying 1kg plain roasted in the shell - more fun shelling them!

It was getting late by now and, while the sun was still strong, we could see the blackening clouds that we’d seen on the BOM app were threatening a huge storm in the area, so we quickly drove to the next town, Nanango, and stopped at the rest area in town just as a huge gust of wind started a massive sand storm and then the rain hit suddenly and hard. Within an hour, the rain had stopped snd we opened up the door to find ourselves surrounded by huge puddles. We could see online that the storm had hit even harder in areas very close to where we’d been including Gympie, Kilcoy and Toowoomba (where we will be tomorrow), with golf ball sized hailstones, as well as bringing down power lines and huge trees.

We bunkered down for the night, threw open all the windows to get some of the cool air into the caravan and sat down to eat some of those Kingaroy peanuts with some delicious North East Victorian sticky tokay.

Eventually we put the nuts away and cooked dinner before relaxing for the evening.

Night night from Nanango in the South Burnett region of Queensland. We are moving ever southwards xxRead more