March 16-20
Finally having escaped the rain we arrive at the small town of Bingara (1200 people) we turned up the Copeton Dam Access Road to find the well publicised Gwydir River Free Camps.
There are several (in fact four) distinct areas which are accessible from the road, as we discovered while exploring the are later so we relied on our GPS to find at least one of them. The one we ended up at is the third along the road, about 6km from town but probably one of the best two.
This is a relatively small area but nice and flat and well cleared between the trees. As we wanted to try out our new Satellite TV system we had to go to the Eastern end to get a clearer line of sight between the trees and past the hlll opposite.
While here we explored the other camps and the riverside campground in the town area, which is supposedly subject to use by “Fully Self Contained Vehicles Only” meaning you have to catch your “grey” water and not drop it on the ground. Our impression was that the campers there were not doing much to comply!
On our fourth morning our LPG ran out and we had to change the bottle over. After this our fridge would not restart on LPG which is an intermittent problem we have had for 12 months. We thought we might have fixed it with a new part but that was not to be. With only the car fridge and quite a lot of shopping we had to move on and find somewhere with mains power to keep the fridge running. We therefore decided to move to Narrabri Showgrounds and order a new fridge to be delivered there…