A Nervous Drive on Wet Black Soil !

Swim Camp and the Wet Drive Home 

We headed into Longreach for the school Swim Camp, a wonderful opportunity for the children to catch up with friends and for us to catch up with some families. While there we re-stocked our food for the next two weeks and then set out for home. 

As we left the sky looked fairly clear and as we have become used to the clouds never fulfilling their promise we set out for the station. I was making the most of our phone service and had finally got in contact with our daughter and grandchildren so was making every last minute count. We had had no phone contact for at least 3 weeks. As such I was not watching which route George took when we headed out of town. 

There are two routes from Muttaburra to Longreach, each about 125kms in distance. We came into town on the one which had only 30 kms of dirt and returned on the road which was all dirt except the first section of bitumen, by accident.

As we continued up the road the black soil was dry but further along it was obvious it had rained as when the tyres hit what looked like dry soil it churned up from under the tyres. At this point we thought, no worries there's only about 20ks of dirt, but it just didn't seem to end. It was hard to judge distance as we were going so slowly.

Next it began to rain adding to the water both on the road and in the ditches on the side of the road. The channels were flowing with small debris but fortunately each channel had a concrete roadway so no trouble for our 4wd ute. Our only problem was the ditch on the side of the road which we needed to stay away from as it was filling and flowing in the opposite direction to which we were traveling. Unfortunately we had no choice when the ute lost traction on the road, swiveled and made its way into the ditch. George was struggling to get the ute out and at one point we stopped, used the UHF to see if there was a local repeater channel to no avail and we began to think we would be spending the night in the ute. Luckily

 on trying again he was able to get the front tyres up out of the ditch and onto the higher dirt on the road. 

The rain eventually eased, then stopped and further up the road it was once more bone dry. The last 60kms to the station as usual was dry, they had missed out on the rain once more. Since we had arrived two weeks before there had been storms across the Central, West and Northern Queensland areas but it has been so random that many people are still 

without the rain they need to survive and re-stock.

By Lynne