Travels with Ninmoore: Day 42: Lake Houdraman at Quilpie

Early drive out to checkout free camp sites around the edge of town and found the awesome campsite at Lake Houdraman just 4km out of town.

Back at the caravan park we got packed away and Ruth just had to have a dip in the Artesian Spa before leaving.

Then out to free camp at Lake Houdraman. This is a fantastic campsite which will be near the top of our list for this trip. We cannot believe that it can get any better - but we keep moving on and we get highlight after highlight.
Cindy and Russ will be jealous when they see the photos of this place and read this blog.

We saw about 12 emus on the road out from the highway to the lake - in different family groups as well as a group of 6x Brolgas in one of the paddocks.

18 emus in the shallows of the lake feeding on aquatic plant life.
2x Red winged parrots (yes we have confirmed the type in the bird book)
Several black swans
Many herons
Inland Dotterel
Spoonbills
Pelicans

The emus later in the afternoon were wandering around the campsite area and during the day we had cattle wandering around us and getting into the water to feed.

We went back into Quilpie to have a look around town and go to the museum and art gallery at the information centre.
This was a lovely little local historical museum with many photos and also booklets of personal stories of life in the area that are available for visitors to sit down and read/ peruse at your will.
The art gallery also had a nicely presented exhibition of "things left to rust".

We asked about the road to Thargomindah whist we were there as we had been told that they have had a bit of rain down that way. We were advised that there is about 40km of dirt road (although the guy at the servo told us that it was only about 25km) - but the road was open so just to take car as it might be a bit rough.

Quilpie is also a major area for the mining of boulder opal and the local Catholic Church has a very unusual alter and lecterns as shown in this photo.

In the late afternoon at dusk we saw a large black wild pig with 2x small piglets feeding along the far bank of the lake.

We also saw a vehicle after dark travelling the other bank of the lake across from us with huge lights - we would say that they are probably pig shooters as they had large bright lights searching along the bank of the lake. However we did not hear any shots during the night.

Tonight we had a fire - as we had taken a walk along the lake and scrounged around at the lake managing to find some good wood to burn. We also bought a small hand saw in town which was a big help to cut a the wood into good sized pieces.

We cooked anther camp oven tonight - and were again stoked with the results of our efforts.
It was was just lovely sitting back by the fire in the early evening waiting for the dinner to cook, having a wine,