Our plans from here to home were big days in the car with an overnight stops on the side of the rd when needed and a couple of nights in our chosen spots. We were headed a road side spot just past Charters Towers, but i had pulled a muscle in my shoulder/upper back area that morning and by the time we hit Charters i could hardly move and wouldn't be much help in setting up the camper so we decided to get a cabin for the night. The next day was going to be another big one in the car so we were on the road a bit earlier than normal. Our destination was Carnavon Gorge, id read about it somewhere but didn't research it much so as we drove in we went past a privately owned campground then a resort and eventually found our way to the national parks campground only to find its only open for camping during school holidays. So it was back up the road to the Takarakka Campground which was quite a nice place and still close to the park.

Again not having researched much about the park we knew there were some walks so we set off the next day to the ranger station for some info and to do a walk. The gorge is a 11km long gorge with little side gorge's and bits to see along the way. Me not being much of a walker (usually winge all the way) Fiona picked out a nice 2k loop walk for us to do but upon looking at the map i decided the loop didn't even go into the gorge so i wanted to do a bigger one (yes you read that correct i wanted to do a bigger walk). So we set off to Moss gorge which has a turn off at 3.2ks from the start. Moss gorge was a nice little climb into a dense rainforest filled gorge with a little waterfall at the end, we all noted how the tempreature dropped the deeper you walked in. After making it back to the main track again we decided we all felt ok and pressed on further up the track another 1.5k's to a place called the ampetheater. The ampetheater was well worth the effort to get to, as we waked up to the bottom of the gorge wall their was a big crack about a meter wide with some stairs leading into it, the crack was about 20 meters long and opened up into what was like a big room with no roof and 60 meter high walls. Being that we had forgotten to bring any drinking water with us we decided to head back to the car and then to the camper for lunch spotting a goanna on the way, it was about half way back i started feeling sore and by the time we got back to the car my legs were pretty well stuffed. We did a total of 10k's for the morning without any complaint from the kids they just kept bouncing along. That afternoon Fiona wanted to do another couple of short walks and i reluctantly agreed and pretty well just hobbled along like a 90 year old but we did see some ancient aboriginal art (looked pretty fresh to me).

The next day we packed up again and were headed for a roadside stop just on the east side of Toowoomba but when we got there it was closed for overnight stops due to the damage it recieved in the flood earlier in the year. Being so late in the evening we decided to press on a bit further to ipswitch and get a motel making our next day's drive to Thunderbird Park a lot shorter.