Day 40 / 41 (8th & 9th July, 2015): Fishermen's Rest at lovely Mitchell - just as good as we remembered!

It was a very cold morning in Augathella this morning - until the sun peeped out and started to warm us up.

We are only going about 180km today one of our favourite towns and free campsites - the Fishermen's Rest free camp at lovely little Mitchell on the Maranoa River.

Our drive today was a short one but we probably encountered more Roos on the move crossing the road ahead of us than we have all the days previously on this trip. 

We have noted that on this road trip we have not seen anywhere near the amount of emus we saw when travelling in outback and western QLD 2x years ago.

We arrived safely (without hitting anything) thank goodness at our campsite and happy to find that we would be able to get a spot in here tonight. 

It was at this free camp that we had met up and spent our first night of travelling with Cindy & Russ. We could have had exactly the same spot again - but opted to get down closer to the river in a more open spot where we would get more sunshine throughout the day.

We got setup, had our lunch in the sun on the rivers edge. it was just devine!!!!

Then it was into Mitchell to take a dip (and to have a shower) at the Mitchell Artesian Spa. It was just sooooo beautiful and warm - 38 degrees - in this water from the Great Artesian Basin!!

next stop was the bakery for a coffee - and we just had to share one of their fantastic sausage rolls.

We spent the late afternoon/ early evening at happy hour round a monster campfire with our neighbouring campers and then after dinner watched the Final State of origin for this year. We were lucky that one of our new found friends had a big caravan and Television that they set up outside to watch the game as we sat by the campfire. These guys were from Mildura so we're going for NSW - but they suffered the loss well.

This was to be our coldest night of this trip - but fell just short of a frost - and as soon as the sun started to peep out from the horizon we were positioned in uninterrupted warm sunlight.

I got up and scrambled around in the bush up the back of the campsites to gather enough would to get our little fire going again and just to take the chill off til the sun got a bit warmer. 

We had already decided (the previous day) that we would make this favourite spot 2x night stopover - and after getting the fire going I decided we would have some toast - something we have not had very often and had been missing.  It was really yummy - so we made bacon and eggs and more toast and had a breakfast feast by the river.

The morning was spent relaxing and reading - bathed in the warm sunlight of a lovely winters morning.

It was then into town again for another swim (and shower) at the Artesian Baths. 

Then back to camp for an afternoon of reading and relaxing by the river!!

The second night we had offered to make a camp oven for our Mildura friends since Mick was keeping his campfire going around the clock and would have lots of good coals for us.

We had happy hour again around his campfire - I think we had about 10 people again. Then we enjoyed our yummy camp oven dinner with Mick and Wendy.

Our second night was not quite as cold as it had closed over late afternoon.