After another great night’s sleep we woke to find it was a gorgeous sunny day. I took advantage of being in a caravan park and got a couple more loads of washing done. I hung them in the motorhome and they could dry during the day. Richard sat outside for a bit and lots of brightly coloured parrots instantly became his friends especially when he found some dried fruit loaf to feed them.

Our Tyre Pressure Management System (TPMS) let us know that we had a tyre with a slow leak so we thought we’d better get that seen to before we did anything else. We set off and found the local Bridgstone service however they couldn’t look at it until 11am so we heade out to the Botanic Gardens for a wander.

We wandered through the lovely gardens for an hour until it was time to return to Bridgestone. The Botanic Gardens in Emerald are very large and situated on both sides of the Nogoa River. There are many paved pathways and most of the plantings have names so you can identify the tree or shrub. Emerald also provide a free camp in the car park at the entrance to the Botanic Gardens. It’s not the best one we’ve seen as it is just an asphalt car park and it’s right below the main highway so it would be noisy. However over the couple of days we spent in Emerald it the RV Park always had lots of campers.

Back at Bridgestone it was quickly detriment that the problem was the valve, not the tyre itself. This was the same problem we’d had right at the beginning of this trip. Luckily Richard had bought a couple of spare valves and it was fixed in no time at all for the grand sum of $38.

Richard really wanted a haircut so our next stop was the Central Highlands Marketplace where we were able to book him in for a haircut at 3pm.

We had spied an Irish pub called The Irish Village in the Main Street opposite the historic railway station and thought it might be a good spot for some lunch. We did enjoy our lunch. I had Guinness pie and Rich had Bangers & Mash and I washed mine down with a pint of Kilkenny. The pub has a real Irish feel about it, apart from being way too big. Real Irish pubs are not usually that big.

Next stop was to Mitre 10 for some stuff that we needed for odd jobs on the motorhome and then it was time to go back to the shopping centre for Rich to get his haircut. While that was happening I took the time to enjoy a little retail therapy. I hadn’t done that for a while.

I did go to BIGW and got some photos of our grandchildren printed so I could update the photo wall in our motorhome. We didn’t even have a photo of our youngest, Theo, and the one of our second youngest was a baby photo. Victor is now nearly 2. It was time to update them.

We decided to drive out to Lake Maraboon and see if that would be a good camp for the night. Not far out of town we came across an orange orchard. That’s the first one we’d seen since we left home over 6 weeks ago.

The name of the dam is Fairbairn Dam but the name of the lake is Lake Maraboon and when full holds three times the water in Sydney Harbour. We found the water level was very low.

You cannot camp around the lake and Lake Maraboon Holiday Park was very full. The vans were all so close together that didn’t appeal at all to us so we turned around in the driveway and headed back to a place we’d see on the way called Higher Ground Farmstay. For $8 per night we got to camp in a sandy paddock. We had a fire pit and a friendly horse for company. Much better than being jammed in like sardines!