Across the Great Dividing Range (Again) – 1/25/2013
Jan 29th, 2013 by admin
It rains all night, At times, it pours down. But there isn’t much wind and when we get up in the morning, the bay is nearly calm, small waves, just chop really.
We pack up and leave for Brisbane. On to the motorway and into rush hour traffic. Of course, it’s Friday before a three day Australia Day weekend. Those not going to work are headed south or west. Nobody is headed north in to the tropical cyclone.
The TV news is starting to ramp for the “disaster”. The situation in the northern part of Queensland is getting quite serious. Townsville, Rockhampton, Gladstone and their surrounding have been getting torrential rains for days now. More importantly, the areas to the west of these areas, their catchment areas are getting it, too. And the drainage is starting to cause real problems as it hitting the coastal cities.
Eric Sevareid, the famous journalist, once said, “A good word is worth a 1,000 pictures.” Well, modern TV journalism doesn’t actually believe that no matter who said it. Until the news crews are sent to the disaster and the video comes back to the station, there is no disaster. Now, the videos are starting to come back and “disaster coverage” is starting up. It ought to be in full swing by tonight.
It’s raining lightly as we pass through Brisbane but the wind is ominously picking up. The storm is coming and the forecast is for the weather to get progressively worse for the next few days.
There is a terrible deja vu about this in Brisbane. In December of 2011, another tropical cyclone dumped enough rain in the Brisbane catchment to cause the Great Flood of 2011, arguably one of the worst floods in Brisbane’s history. When Barbara and I took a cruise up the Brisbane river, the repairs of the damage of the 2011 flood were still ongoing. No one wants a repeat but everyone is expecting a repeat.
We pass on visiting Brisbane and head for Ipswich. Ironically, just a few weeks ago, Ipswich was in the area of Queensland that suffered through a week of bad brush fires. Now, it’s expecting to be flooded. For all its marvelous beauty this can be a very cruel country. Meanwhile, across the Great Dividing Range, the skies are sunny, the temperatures are in the high 30’s and everyone is readying the barbie for the Australia Day weekend.
We’re driving on the M2 motorway and then the A2 highway. By the time we get to Ipswich, we’ve driven out of the rain but the skies are a sullen gray. It’s not raining but there is almost a constant mist in the air. The storm is coming.
On to Toowoomba where the sun is still out. The bad news is that Toowoomba is under the forecast storm alert. At this moment it’s hard to believe but the reach of this cyclone is massive and we have no doubt that the weather will deteriorate and, when it does, we don’t want to be here. Take a left in Toowoomba and head down the New England Highway.
All the way down the New England Highway the weather is fine: no rain and blue, sunny skies with small, puffy, white cumulus clouds. It’s hard to believe that most of this area is under the storm warning. Through Warwick, Stanthorpe, Tenterfield and Glen Innes, it seems like a trip through the English countryside which is no accident. Their intention is to be more Britsh than the UK. If looks matter, they might be. Finally, we get to Guyra.
Guyra? It’s not in the Lonely Planet or Frommer’s. Normally, we check the guides and, if there’s nothing cited, we move on unless something grabs our attention. Guyra is having the Lamb and Potato Festival. Not surprisingly, we stop. You would have, too.
It really is a small town country festival. Little booths line the main road through town (which, in this case, is the main route through the area, the New England Highway.) The booths have crafts, vegetables, soaps, emu oil (?), henna tattoos, everything that you expect to see at a country festival. And there are a couple of booths selling those items that you see being hawked on late night cable by screaming the products virtues at the tops of their lungs.
Everyone is so friendly and chatty. Did you know that Guyra has the largest tomato greenhouse in the southern hemisphere. We didn’t.
There’s even a man trying to sell these small knife sharpeners. You know the product: it’s got a small V shaped slot that you drag the blade through and it’s mounted on s small suction cup so that you can “leave it anywhere in the kitchen so that’s it’s there when you need it.” It’s the commercial where the man drags a small knife through the sharpener and then slices up a tomato.
The man in the booth is doing a quite good imitation of the TV commercial. He even closes with the obligatory, “If you buy now I’ll even throw in the amazing grater.” He doesn’t, however, offer 2 for the price of 1 if we buy in the next 10 minutes. We pass and he immediately ignores us. No sale, no talk.
Farther down the road, there’s another booth selling a whole collection of late night cable “not-available-in-any-store” items. This man, however, doesn’t have any sales pitch at all. But he is a very personable bloke and, in less then 2 minutes, we’re both having a great chat with him. And when he finds out that we’re trying to drive the Cherokee around the world, that’s all he wants to talk about.
We chat for quite a while but then we have to move on. It’s starting to get late and we haven’t even decided what to do for the night. On our way back to the car, we see a sigh for a “Military Vehicle Rally.” Instead of leaving Guyra, we start following the signs to the show ground which is apparently used mostly for sheep shearing contests and rodeos.
We drive in to the show grounds and in the back of the sheep shearing shed, there’s a collection of old military vehicles. There are WWII vintage jeeps, 6X6’s, a fully tracked personnel carrier and the star of the show, a pre-WWII US Army Stuart tank! And the owners/restorers are standing there drinking beers.
The minute we stop to talk, the game is on. There’s no one who willing to talk more than restorers of old vehicles. They’re an amazing collection with amazing set of stories. And every one is a great story.
Of course, when we drove up everyone noticed the California plates and the left-hand drive so as soon as they can finish the story of their vehicle the questions strat to fly about the trip. We finally leave (after refusing more beers than any single person should ever have to refuse.)
On the way out of town, the sky is just starting to cloud over. The storm, though a long ways away, is starting to arrive. We were just starting to talk about camping for the night when the skies started to turn gray. Camping is out. Back to Guyra to see if there’s a motel with room.
The first motel shows “No Vacancy” but the second, and only other, has had a cancellation. We take the room. It’s not raining yet but the skies are gray and the wind is up. Tomorrow, the rain will be here in the morning.
Obi-wan