The night was cool but certainly not as cold as our recent trip to the west. We awoke to a bright sunny day and a mild temperature. Showers forecast for this area had not eventuated.
With no hurry to depart (we could not arrive in Gunnedah before 11am), we took our time in having breakfast and stowing the remained of our items that had travelled from Sydney in bags.
Whilst preparing the caravan for departure, a mandatory inspection of our solar regulator reveal that the unit appeared to be frozen. There had been an indication of this yesterday but we had wrong assumed that the tree we were parked under had reduced the amount of solar input. This situation has happened once before so an attempt was made to reset the unit via a reset button. This did not work and “He” was forced to disconnect the unit from the battery (required the removal of the unit from the wall) and once the power was recycled, the unit reinitialised and commenced working. We will need to keep an eye on this as we will have a reliance on solar power later during this trip.
We departed our camp site at 10:00am was took a rural road to Quirindi before re-joining the main highway to Gunnedah. We did go close to having an incident when a couple riding adjacent to each other coming in the opposite direction came of the top of a hill. Just behind them a car was about to pass and would have crossed to our side of the road at the same moment we went past the cyclists. Fortunately, everyone was aware of the situation and an incident was avoided.
After leaving Quirindi we came across several hundred head of cattle grazing on the side of the road. There was a camp nearby being occupied by the drovers and their horses. We had to reduce our speed to a crawl to avoid the cattle that decided to cross the road directly in front of us. The cattle were spread over several kilometres.
We did notice signs adjacent to the road saying, “Farming Not Coal”. Apparently, several Japanese companies have been able to obtain farming properties with the intention to extract both gas and cold. The area is rich in coal seams but more importantly, is also considered a very important food production area. Time will tell what happens here.
We arrived in Gunnedah just after 11am in checked into the caravan park. We were given a large site and “He” had no problems in reversing onto the site. After the mandatory “setup”, we had a quick lunch before a quick visit to Coles.
Later in the afternoon we visited relatives and enjoyed afternoon tea with them. It was good to catch-up.
We decided to have our relatives join us for tea at a local Chinese restaurant. The food was delicious and abundant.
We were back at our caravan just after 9:00pm where we watched television until 10:30pm. “He” took advantage of the connected water supply and enjoyed a shower “a little longer” than what we normally experience in the caravan.
The van is relatively cool so we expect to have a good sleep