We are so close to home now but we couldn't quite make it without having more vehicle problems. This time it was a bearing collapse on the trailer. In many ways it worked out good. It was only that Zach needed to do a wee that we pulled over and normally I would take him, but this time Matt went. Matt happened to check the wheels on the way back and if we kept driving it wouldn't have been long before the wheel fell off. We are assuming this all happened as we lo...

It rained all night and we woke up to most of the caravan park flooded. The poor people in tents were gone by the time we got up as they were where the puddles were. I was worried we would miss out on the Chambers of the Black Hand with many roads flooded so we rang ahead and it was still open. We did drive through a couple of flooded roads to get there but there were also a fair few other people there that made the effort too. It was a great place to visit...

We started the day at the Artesian Hot Springs which is only 200m down the road from where we are staying. The Great Artesian Basin covers 22% of Australia and this particular bore goes down 1km.They have one big one which is fairly hot and this runs into a smaller shallow pool which is a little cooler. This was great for the kids so we spent most of the time there. We then went back to camp for a swim in the camp pool. It is heated so was also really nice ...

Driving on to Lightning Ridge today, we stopped around halfway at Narrabri. We went to Australia's Telescope Compact Array. It was well set up for tourists with good information around and it was all free and self guided. Playing with the whispering dishes were fun, where two dishes face each other about 50m apart and if you stand in the right position and whisper, the sound comes out clearly for the person at the other end. The compact array is where they use ...

It was a nice drive north as we heading into Coonabarabran where we would be spending New Year's Eve. It was a bigger town than I expected but they still didn't have anything on for the night such as fireworks. We checked out the Crystal Kingdom which was free to look around at their mineral and gemstone collection. It was a good collection and a nice lady in store. We then went back for a swim in the caravan park pool. There is only about 3 people camping...