We arrived in Roma a couple of weeks ago, after spending a couple of days in Charleville and a couple of weeks in Mitchell.
Charleville is a nice little town in Queensland’s mulga country. The people are very friendly and there are a couple of nice pubs. For the tourists, there’s the Cosmos Centre Observatory where you can look at the night sky through their telescope, and there’s the National Parks Research Station which is the home of the Save the Bilby fund. The ‘meet the bilbies’ tours are only held on certain days, and unfortunately we didn’t manage to make a tour. Next time though, they are very cute animals.
As mentioned in the previous post, there wasn’t any work around town so we only spent a couple of days but we met some really nice people at the Cobb & Co Caravan Park, including the owner Duke who is a real character. There are 2 parks in town, both of them pretty good, but if you have a rig as big as ours, then this is the one to stay in. There are also a number of stations in the area which offer camping facilities. Duke has recently extended the park adding more toilet/showers and laundry facilities and is planning on adding more grassed areas. Nearly all the sties have half 44 gallon drums for use by the guests as fireplaces for either sitting around or for cooking in. We decided to take advantage of ours and we cooked up a cheesy damper for lunch, then a roast lamb for dinner. Both were really delicious 
. Here’s a few photos – the animal heads are hanging in one of the pubs. Bit creepy! The mural is also from the same pub. Sorry about the flash showing on it, was a bit hard getting a photo. I also couldn’t get the whole thing in, it’s huge. I really need to learn how to use my camera properly.
After Charleville we drove a couple of hours to Mitchell.
Mitchell’s located on the Warrego Highway just under 600km west of Brisbane and is the gateway to the Queensland outback. The town is built on the Great Artesian Basin and there is a great hot spa at the information centre (which also has a well equipped gymnasium, which is free). It’s very easy to spend a while in the spa each day while you’re there. It does get busy though.
The caravan park in Mitchell is good, with en-suite style shower facilities, and they have a great camp oven pit where happy hour is held each day, and camp oven cookouts are often held there, usually as a fund raiser for local schools etc.
We’d liked to have stayed in Mitchell but getting work was a priority and we didn’t manage to pick up anything there so decided to head further east. However while we were there we did a lot of walking around the town which has some lovely bottle trees and colonial buildings. The Maranoa River Walk parallels the road bridge (the Maranoa River Bridge) and runs from the caravan park into town across the river. It’s a pretty walk and as part of the Graffiti Arts Project, some very talented artists have painted the road bridge uprights with murals celebrating the town’s past, present and future. There are also lots of birds in the area if you’re interested in bird watching..
Roma’s a town of approximately 7000 people, and is the commercial hub for the area. It’s also where oil and gas were first discovered in Australia. There’s a museum documenting the history of the discovery and they have a light and sound night show which we’ve heard is good. We haven’t been to it yet, but we’ll get there. There’s also a winery and the cattle sales yards which we plan on going to as well.
We really like the town and David has picked up work so we’ll stay around for a while. It’s also not too far from David’s brother and sister in law so hopefully we’ll manage to catch up with them a few times while we’re in the area. It’s a good base to explore the western downs area of Queensland and we plan on doing lots of driving around checking it out.
I haven’t looked for work yet, but will probably give some serious consideration to it in the next week or so.
I’ll update more about the town and the area as we actually start to do things, right now it’s been more about finding work and settling in at the Big Rig Tourist Park (which is a nice park if you find yourself in the area and need somewhere to stop). The park’s only 1km from town and we’ve been doing lots of walking both into town and on the walking/riding path which starts/stops just across the road, so we might end up a bit fitter too. Bonus.
I haven’t taken photos around Roma yet, but here’s a couple of some little birds that flit around in the tree outside our van. One of them frequently sits on the window next to my chair and talks to his reflection in the window. They are very cute little birds. I believe they are part of the wren family, and are called Striated Pardalote. But feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, I’m still learning about birds.
