Oakey Creek

Thursday 21st August.

Time to move on from Warra where we have spent the last two nights in very pleasant surroundings. Roughly 45 km's east on the Warrego Highway to Dalby in the centre of the cotton and wheat belt. The cotton has all been harvested and ready for new planting in the extremely large paddocks bounding the highway on both sides. We noticed a couple of large cotton processing plants as we travelled along, presumably either taking a breather from recent ginning activity or currently in the midst of it. The wheat appears to be an alternative crop grown in between the more major cotton crops as the wheat fields are nowhere near as extensive as the cotton.

We parked in Dalby to do some food shopping at Coles, also topped up with diesel which at 153.9 cents per litre was the second cheapest we have encountered on the whole trip over the last four months. Also filled one of the LPG gas cylinders, as we have been using a fair amount of gas due to the continuous run of free camping with no mains power other than when we run the generator.

After lunch we continued east on the Warrego Highway a further 40 or so km's then turned right off the highway for about another 5 km's to our next overnight stop. Oakley Creek Recreation Park is a lovely large open grassed area with toilets beside the Oakey Creek which is a tributary of the Condamine river. Once again we found quite a few caravans, motorhomes and fifth wheelers spread around the exceptionally large camping area already settled in. This seems to be the case with the nicer rest / camp areas as word of mouth is definitely the best means of gaining knowledge and information relating to the better "freebies" while on the road.

As we are parked on nice green grass I took the opportunity to crawl around under the motorhome to do some checking and maintenance during the afternoon in the pleasant sunshine while Gail found the most sheltered side of the motorhome to sit and catch up on some reading.