I love a sunburnt country

In 2015 we aimed to go to Hervey Bay for a visit, but that got aborted due to uncooperative weather.  A little later Frances suggested that for 2016 we should aim for a trip to the Atherton Tablelands, renting a house for a month and taking a week each way to get there.  So that is what we are aiming for.

We are planning to travel inland, coming back by a slightly more westerly route.

This route will bring us back through Charleville, scene of a massive fertiliser explosion: hopefully they will have fixed the road as the diversion added 600km to the trip.  At the time of posting, a little before we leave it appears that the area around Winton is a tad damp as shown by the various roads closed for flooding according to the RACQ site.

The next two images - snips from Google Earth, with added arrows showing our direction of travel  - possibly explain why it gets flooded in the area.  First Winton:

Then Longreach

I think these would be called braided rivers in New Zealand!  Hopefully it will have dried out in 6 weeks time, or we'll be coming back down the coast.

In fact, looking at the websites for the various towns we will be going through, they have pretty much all been flooded at some point in the not too distant past (and quite a few of them have flood warnings as I type, two weeks out).  So here is verse 2 from Dorothea Mackellar's famous poem "My country" with a little added emphasis.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror The wide brown land for me! 

I shall try to find opportunities to use other material from this ode in the rest of the trip.