No Surprise

The day starts out sunny, with some high cloud.  At eight this morning it's eighteen degrees.  Even though we had a heavy rain shower last night everything is bone dry when we wake up.  If you slept through the shower, you'd never know that it had been raining.
After our usual breakfast of porridge, tea for me and coffee for him, we filled up with fuel and set off for some sightseeing around town.
On the way to Lake Belmore, we stopped off at Diehms Lookout for a bird's eye view of the town.
At Lake Belmore we found a different variety of Kapok Bush with fruit much larger than we've seen anywhere so far.

Kapok Fruit and Flowers.

Lake Belmore supplies water to Croydon.  Also a good fishing and swimming spot three kilometres from Croydon.
Our journey continues along the Gulf Developmental Road (Savannah Way), across the Gilbert River, to Georgetown, (where we find it too late to purchase lunch and so have a picnic lunch by the railway station-with leftovers) and then arrive at Mount Surprise.
Georgetown made the news earlier this year when it was inundated with water from heavy rains.
Andrew was looking forward to arriving in Mount Surprise, but we found no surprises there, in fact there wasn't much there at all.
We debated going to Undara and seeing the Lava Tubes but did Kalkani Crater only.  The crater was a bit disappointing and the views would have been more spectacular had the weather been less cloudy.

Before arriving at Georgetown we stopped at the Cumberland Chimney Historic Site for morning tea.
Enjoyed tea and biscuits with the water birds.

Amazing how quickly a day flies by.  Before we knew it we were looking for a camp for the night.  There's free camping at Forty Mile Scrub National Park, well, actually it's not at the N.P. but on the grass verge by the road, (so we found out).  We had contemplated spending the night there until we saw just how close to the road the stop was. Even the N.P. itself is tiny...one ten minute walk is available, which we completed before moving on.  Next stop Mount Garnet, again not much on the main road itself but managed to find a quiet little caravan park off the main thoroughfare where we set up camp on the grass, right next to the camp kitchen.   We had a camp fire AND watched TV tonight!