Day 1 - Tamworth Country Music Festival 2020

After lunch at home we headed off with our Bushtracker caravan for the Tamworth Country Music Festival 2020. We left Miki at home alone for one night, but our friend came to visit her and make sure she was OK and had plenty of food and water. Our house sitter will drive from Brisbane tomorrow to care for her. Our Bushtracker caravan seems very spacious without Coco and Miki, but we do miss them.

We took the winding westerly route through Beaudesert and Boonah. The drought has left the normally green hinterland looking parched. The Fassifern Valley has dry desolate paddocks. As we turned southwest onto the Cunningham Highway the sky to the north was very dark and we were glad not to be heading in that direction.


As we climbed up towards Cunningham's Gap it was raining and we heard CB radio chatter about an accident. One driver complained that he had reported water over the road in the morning after a ute nearly crashed into his truck. When we passed the site there was water over both east bound downhill lanes. Police and ambulance crews were dealing with the aftermath of an accident. The road has since been intermittently closed in both directions.

Further up towards The Gap there is extensive erosion of large areas of the Main Range National Park burned in fires late last year. The inside lane has been barricaded to contain the debris that is falling down the steep slopes. Anita managed to take a couple of photos as we drove through the rain.




The rain wasn't heavy as we passed through Warwick so we decided to continue to the Stanthorpe caravan park we visited in 2016. Tankers have been delivering water from Warwick to Stanthorpe since the town ran dry last year. Several road signs warn about the trucks because they are slow travelling up hills. Ironically we were following two water trucks when heavy rain started falling.

The rain caused us to abandon our plans to walk into town for dinner. Fortunately we had a raincoat and umbrella in the car. We parked in a drive-through site without bothering to level the van. I connected the power and Anita cooked dinner. Between 5 and 10pm over 50mm of rain fell in Stanthorpe. Hopefully some rain fell in the Storm King Dam which normally supplies water to the 5,000 people who live in this town.

Location: Stanthorpe, Australia

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