Hughenden, outback Queensland; Sunday 22 July 2012

A cold sunny Sunday morning for our tent pack up and a cleaning frenzy still happening in the Pelican Caravan Park. Gee, my yesterday email must've struck fear into the owners of this place, knowing the local Council Health Inspector was going to return in 2 days' time and see the same email!

Because I wrote my email in my name, and we are booked in under Dave's surname, I don't think the management has a clue who has dobbed their uncleanliness in, and I didn't mention our motorbikes. Heh heh! At least my action has made the caravan park a bit cleaner for other campers.

Anyway, we had a good day riding along bumpy long flat roads, looking at rather boring grasslands, but the potholes and patched up bits of road kept us concentrating. We stopped for a light lunch at a little roadhouse called Stamford and had a nice chat with a young lady serving us. A very welcome break before we headed off on 15km of dirt roadworks before getting back to bitumen again.

We had booked a cabin for one night at Hughenden, the Allen Terry Caravan Park. Very neat and tidy, and, we were told that the Country music singer Chad Morgan was in the cabin next to us. We had learned about this cute little buck-toothed singer in Tamworth, and to be honest, I thought he had died years ago, but no, there was this cute little funny-toothed old man with a walking stick on the verandah of the cabin, and of course, I dashed over with my writing pad and a pen and asked for his autograph, for my son Gavin who is also a musician. Chad will be 80 years old soon, and he was a delightful gentleman, having just done a country music concert in town the night before for the Hughenden Country Music Festival. He is very with-it; a tuned-in guy with a great sense of humour, and we ended up chatting about the motorbikes he used to ride, Nortons, Aerials, BSAs, and he knew how to ride too. He told us "I've seen a lot (of musicians) come and go, and I'm still around!" I also bought his latest CD off him, getting it signed of course, and he gave us a lovely signed photo of him and his wife Joanie. Later on I googled Chad Morgan and saw a lot more very interesting stuff about this fellow who is such a country music star. So glad I met him!

Dave and I then got fully settled into our fancy cabin, and walked a short distance to Hughenden town site, to explore the local Muttabuttasaurus Museum. Dave has a total fetish for saying Muttabuttasaurus! He loves this word. He also got excited at seeing a huge Muttabuttasaurus model in the main street. He played with toy dinosaur puppets in the museum as well. The lady selling tickets at the museum thought we wouldn't be long in there, but got a surprise to see we were the 1st tourists in there for the day, and the last ones out. As usual, it was closing time and time to chuck us out of there; such is our love of poring over fossils, rocks and local history.

After getting back outside, we could hear some really good music playing loudly somewhere in town, so we followed this noise, coming behind a local pub, and we slipped in through a gap in the fence. Lots of very pleasantly plonked rather drunk young people were dancing and weaving all over the place, to the music played by a very good 5-piece band of young ones not drunk or whatever. I was very impressed with the quality of their guitar work, their singers and the drummer…they were good! The young ones laughed when we oldies came in, me with my hiking stick and we were given a can of beer each and told to join in the dancing which we did. I showed them what Dorky Dancing is all about and impressed them with my moves ha ha, while Dave swivelled his hips and had a big Mexican sombrero hat put on his head, which made him look as pie eyed as the drunken young ones next to him! We had a ball dancing away, I felt young again doing the dorky dancing in the cold sunshine in the outdoor garden of this party, which was a wind up for a winning local rugby team apparently.

Time to finish off this fun, and we ended up having a lovely meal in our cosy cabin, where we watched a great show on SBS TV about camels in Australia, and a camel was dissected to show how fascinating their biology is, no wonder they are such amazing animals. And featured on this show was the tiny camel jockey Glenda Sutton, whom we had seen winning so many camel races in Winton the day before. Talk about serendipity! She is an inspirational woman, and so kind to her camels.

Time for a good snuggle up sleep in a real bed before our ride to Charters Towers tomorrow.