What a gorgeous sunny day we woke to at Bald Rock. It was a shame to leave. What a pity it was that we couldn’t climb the rock that day instead of the miserable day the day before!

We were up and away by 8.30am after I had got up on our roof with a broom to clean off all the sticks and leaves that had fallen on us during the windy night. The slide out was covered in leaves and little sticks. You don’t want to slide in with those still on there!

We just had to stop at the NSW/Queensland border. It has become a bit of a tradition when travelling with Katie, Riley, Ben and Maddie to stop at each state boundary and get a photo. So here we are at the border.

What a lovely little town is Stanthorpe. We were very impressed with this little town with its lovely flower beds and roundabouts. Some 6,000 people call Stanthorpe home. The lovely main shopping street looked full of interesting shops as well as many of the chain stores . It seemed to be a large shopping area for a small town so maybe there’s a larger shopping population that uses Stanthorpe as its shopping centre.

The Stanthorpe area is well known for its apple orchards and not far out of town is another Aussie ‘big thing’, The Big Apple. Of course, there’s a cafe next to it. We only stopped for a photo.

We passed lots of apple orchards, vineyards and a few cellar doors along the way out of Stanthorpe heading towards Warwick. It was a really cold day, only 7 degrees with a bitterly cold breeze blowing but the sun was shining.

Isn’t it excting to venture on a road you’ve never been on before?

We passed through the town of Warwick that we had been to before on our way from Goondiwindi to Brisbane. We didn’t stop in Warwick though and continued on to Toowoomba.

We arrived in ‘The Garden City’ of Toowoomba and went directly to the Tourist Centre where we stopped and had a look inside. Toowoomba is known as the Garden City because of the large number of parks and gardens. The council budget for parks and gardens must be huge as all the ones we saw were immaculately kept.

One of the very friendly staff at the Tourist Centre told us about Picnic Point and we thought that would be a great spot for a lunch break so back in the vehicles and off to Picnic Point. Toowoomba is built at the top of a huge escarpment on the eastern side and Picnic Point has been a tourist destination since the 1800’s. The view from there down across the escarpment is gorgeous. There’s been a cafe/ restaurant there for years and it’s a very popular spot.

We had our lunch and then walked around Picnic Point admiring the views. Ben and Maddie spied photos of an amazing park so we had to go check that out.

After our little wander around Picnic Point we set off again towards Dalby. It seemed to take ages to get out of the city and had to remember that Toowoomba is huge by Australian town standards. Some 120,000 people live in Toowoomba!

Somewhere near Oaky we spied a huge solar farm so I just had to google it. Wow it’s huge! Oakey Solar Farm is a 100MWp farm that generates enough power to supply 10,000 homes. It was built in 2019.

We were driving through a huge farming area and the land became very flat after Warwick with that rich black soil. Cotton fluff balls lined the sides of the road. As we drove into Dalby there were some huge farm machinery dealers. Agriculture looked to be the mainstay of the area.

We made it to Dalby and checked into the Pioneer Caravan Park. $33 per night for a powered site (no extra charge for the kids!) and we managed two sites next to each other. As in many parks we had to drive the moho in to the site because if we reversed in we couldn’t get level. I do prefer it that way anyway as then our doors and awnings are facing each other. Some parks frown upon it though as it’s a risk and vehicles have to face the road. Not sure how they work this out as we can just reverse out whereas the caravans around us all have to hook up before they can go anywhere!

After we set up camp the chores needed doing so washing was done etc. Ben and Maddie took great advantage of the paved roads to ride their scooters. Katie and I did a quick shop at Aldi and we settled in to enjoy chicken burgers sitting under our awning. Another great day!