Monday 23rd September - Saunders Beach to Rollingstone
17 degrees last night and upto 30.6 today. A bit cloudy but pleasant. Free camping again today. We arrived about a quarter to one, as again with free camps we like to leave late. When we left Saunders Beach there was only four vehicles left from last night. The people next to us were also leaving and probably heading to Hughenden to follow the dinosaur trail. Clive was talking to them and gave them some of the DVD's that we had watched on travelling around Qld. One was particularly on Hughenden. The Saunders Beach rest area is only a 48 hour park and yet there were people in a van that were there before us and it looked like they had no intention of moving, even though they had been there for the 48 hours. Some people spoil it for others by not playing by the rules. This camp is a beautiful spot with lots of shade and birds calling in the trees. There are mainly caravans and RV's here and currently no combis. Jeeves had us turning onto a road that had a really low bridge. It was only 2.4m so we got out the specs for our van to double check and we are 2.7m, so a good thing we checked it out. As it happened, we had turned down the wrong road anyway, so a quick U-turn back to the highway and we took the next turn off. Past the police station and we are here. The police had patrolled twice in the park since we arrived, so we don't know whether that is a good thing or not. Anyway, no noise or trouble overnight, just the sounds of the bush and the occasional train going past. Watching TV tonight the red light on the battery system starts flashing, meaning that we are running out of juice. We've been using the 12v outlet on the TV, not through the inverter, but after 3 days and cloudy weather it looks like that's about the limit. So, 10.00pm the TV gets switched off and we just have the lights on. We couldn't even turn on another set of lights with the TV starting to fade. We even turned the fans off. Clive will check that the Anderson plug is working correctly as the sparky who put it made the lead a lot shorter than the van cable and with it cable tied together he thinks that if we take a sharp turn it's coming out, so the van batteries are not getting charged form the alternator when we are driving. The fact that the fridge is running on battery when we travel means that because of this it's shortening the battery time that we used to get. A job for tomorrow. Clive cooked bacon and eggs for tea on a BBQ in the park.