After cereal and toast at our motel we headed for Picnic point lookout, where we looked down over the escarpment to the view spreading away into the distance. It wasn’t raining where we were, but we could see it still coming down closer to the coast.
We were surprised to hear the sounds of a waterfall, and followed the noise to find an artificial fall running down to a small lake below. This was surrounded by lovely gardens. Toowoomba is known as the garden City and it would be interesting to see it in September.
I am always a sucker for a sensory garden so we headed off to investigate Laurel Bank Gardens sensory garden with many touch and smell sensations before we enjoyed the quirky topiary, planting of hybrid tea roses, wisteria arbour and the geckos. There was a lovely little edible garden here too.
There are a couple of very impressive looking schools in Toowoomba ( the grammar school and The Glennie School -“ all she can be”) with huge spreading grass and buildings and picket fences.
Despite the lush green everywhere they are still on water restrictions with signs around town encouraging 175 l goal (per person per day) water use
As we drove south from Toowoomba the main crop was Corn, growing in dark rich looking soil ( almost black)
We stopped at Lake Coolmunda for lunch. Again, we were alone in a huge picnic area near a boat ramp. There is camping just a little way back from the lake, with free day use in the areas very close to the ramp. The day felt grey and cool but there was a warm breeze. ( Like our hot north winds in SA)
We chose the lower road towards Inglewood and then Yelarbon ( according to the sign this is bird watchers paradise) taking a photo of their painted silos
and checked out the recreation ground/ campsite which has a tick in our camps book indicating that it is really good. This is only a tiny town and the old small community rec ground at the unused oval uses the inner oval for unpowered camping and the outer gravel area for powered. There is a little shed for a laundry and book exchange with old railway station building used for toilets and showers.
We think that the title of “Bird watchers paradise” might be fitting, as the local lake seemed to support a good variety of birds. (we even think we saw tree creepers).
We took the minor roads from here, and were caught by an unexpected road closure, but enjoyed the bright parrots, and wide open spaces as we travelled the isolated dirt roads through to North Star.
At this point we were planning to stay in the Mt Kapatur National Park, arriving pretty close to dark, but luckily got on to the web site and found that their campgrounds are currently closed due to recent fires, so we replanned.
As we reconsidered accommodation options we admired the many sunflowers at the side of road between Moree and Narrabri and drove through a narrow band of driving rain as we looked at the lakes of water on either side of the road and eliminated the ” just pull off a little” option.
Eventually we arrived at an excellent campsite. Yarrie Lake, near Narrabri is thought to be a meteor crater. For $20 we had a roof over a concrete slab, table with benches, our own bin and tap and all of this only about 10m from the waters edge with a frog and owl chorus to sing us to sleep.
Toilets and showers were available around the lake a little, where the caretaker was. Apparently this lake has been dry for three years. You wouldn’t know it right now!
Luvapuzzle 