East East East....

Its a looooong way across the eastern half of Australia! We had looooong driving days, broken up with a stops in the "Dinosaur belt" towns of Richmond and Hughenden. Dinosaur bones and skeletons are common in the area, and we went through the museum at Richmond which was really extensive.

The town has a fantastic free RV Park where we stayed the night. You need to be self contained, with your own water and toilet and especially tanks to collect waste. It's a little exposed at the moment, but they have planted trees to define the bays and they will grow and give wonderful shade eventually.
It was a special day for us, too. The 1st of October 2013 was the day that Duncan flew up to Brisbane and bought Bertha. It was Bertha's Birthday!

We also called into Hughenden for a quick pit stop, before heading on to the gold rush town of Charters Towers for the night. We had a walk around town the next morning, as it is simply beautiful. The town was swimming in money during the gold rush, and even had a working stock exchange there. We stopped for a milkshake while while trying to figure out what we wanted to do next. 

We HAD intended to head for the tip as soon as possible. But in the meantime, Duncan had discovered that another bus-living family was headed our way. 'Holiday Road' were one of the first families I came across when I started researching for this trip. They left their home with 5 children in an Austral Tourmaster bus almost the same model as ours. Ten years later, they now have 11 children and are still living in the same bus. Duncan has been chatting with Pete about various bus issues over the year, and we've been following each other on Facebook. Now we were heading to the east coast, and they were heading to the NT and it looked like we might actually cross paths if we slowed down a bit.  

We decided to head to a nearby free camp which sounded nice. Macrossan Park was only a short way down the road, which was good as Dunc could do with a rest from long days driving. We chilled out for the afternoon and watched the sun set over the nearby rail bridge, hoping to catch up with Pete and Allison and the kids the next day.