Not sure where the river in the photo is - it could have been one of the many rivers I have camped along - but today there is no photo content because I am having my first McDonalds wifi experience and am not bringing my hard drive.

Today we find ourselves in Roma and this morning we had a great experience at the Roma Sale yards listening to the auctioning off of 'Prime' cattle and even more interestingly watching the stockmen herd the sold batches of cattle into yards where the 'pushers'(?) use long sticks with plastic bags on the end to get them onto the scales so they can be weighed and their price worked out. Brilliant and not something you see everyday (although you can see it every Tuesday and Thursday here).

Since we left you in Quilpie we have been to Charleville, Augethella, Morven and Mitchell (and possibly a few small towns in between).

Charleville did not live up to expectations but only in as much as there is a lot of burning off going on (3 years of good rain = fire hazard this summer) and the view through the telescope at the Cosmos Centre is somewhat hazy and in fact on one night even had to be cancelled due to ash dropping (a lot like in Tallebudgera when they are burning cane in NSW!) We did get to spend some time being attacked by geese and our caravan park had its own tame kangaroo so it wasn't all bad.

A quick pause here to give a shout out to Bev and John our travelling companions of the last few weeks who have sadly turned south today to head home to Tumerong (?) and I know that at some point tomorrow Jude is going to say to me 'Where are our friends? Where are Bev and John?'

We have met some lovely people along the way and all of them make a fuss of Jude and no doubt we will meet more lovely people as we now turn north again.

A special treat for us yesterday was catching up with Dave & Sandy Thomas (the pastor from our church) who were driving through on their way back from Birdsville where they worked flat out and didn't see the race but still loved their time in the Outback. Even though I am not at all homesick, it was lovely seeing familiar faces and nice for Jude tho' he did have a moment that morning thinking that it was his Poppa that we were seeing and you should have seen his face light up for that!

Jude has really embraced the terrible twos over the last few weeks and wherever he sees a boundary he has to push it so we have a number of disagreements every day and unfortunately I don't win all of them but this would be no different if we where stuck at home and at least here I get to change the location of his misbehaving every day! His favourite song at the moment is the alphabet song which he gets 90% correct if I am singing with him and 40% correct if he is singing by himself. Speaking of singing he has got into the (delightful) habit of breaking into song at any time about anything and I am loving that.

From here we head to Injune and Carnarvon Gorge National Park and on to Emerald before heading West again. Apparently there is a rat plague North and West of Longreach so that's something to look forward to!

I imagine this is my last McDonalds for a while too (the last one was in Broken Hill) so no more free wifi but will do my best to find 15 minutes here and there in libraries to keep the journal going and will post some more photos as soon as possible cos we have seen some lovely things.

I know you are all having your own adventures they just don't involve a campervan and a 2 year old and I would love to hear about them.

PnJ