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We ventured into Queensland and chased a squall line in the western Queensland before calling it a night. |
We were up early again the next morning (except Matt), we decided to head north to Bourke (200km), and then perhaps further into Queensland towards Cunnamulla (further 250km). We discovered that while the road between Bourke and Cobar has only been recently sealed, it was amongst the worst roads ever! Although it did improve after 30km or so north out of town, but still lots of potholes and dips. We also counted ourself fairly lucky going past a police car way too fast, but he didn’t pull us over (fortunately!) In Bourke we phoned Matthew Pearce (Doc) and he suggested to keep on going north. Well, like clockwork the skies cleared to glorious signs of instability and CJs as we crossed the NSW border into QLD!
 
The roads improved dramatically too, with only minimal bumps! We stopped periodically from then on, keeping an eye on the storms that were developing to our west. They seemed to be on some sort of line. We decided to keep going north into Cunnamulla, before heading west towards Eulo and Thargomindah. We got to Eulo and had a very nice line of storms approaching with a nice shelf cloud! We were sitting on the edge of town and a very nice CG struck through the guster, giving a good crack of thunder about 10 seconds later!
We followed the storms east (we the chaser became the chasee), trying to stay ahead of the main line. The problem was that the outflow from the storms was kicking up showers and storms further ahead of the line. So that made the storms effectively travel faster.
We ended up getting slammed by gusty winds and heavy rain every so often, from downbursts – the rain was sweeping nicely in front of the car! We eventually did get ahead of the line, at Cunnamulla – we made a dash east on the Ballone Hwy (much to Macca’s excitement of finally travelling on a highway that was spelt like a lunchmeat). Further ahead, more storms had just recently developed. They were more isolated and looked quite strong, however there was only one road and that went east/west, and we had to put up with sporadic advantage points. We witnessed some nice CGs from the storms, even at 30-40km away, and it was certainly a nice way to end the afternoon!
 
At evening we decided to head back to Cunnamulla, it was getting dark and kangaroos were going to be a problem. Even at only doing 80km/h, we had one close call with a kangaroo – but fortunately it all occurred without incident.
We booked ourselves into a cabin at Cunnamulla, we felt quite guilty – it was raining lightly, and the ground was muddy. We had a beautiful newly refurbished cabin – that was now full of muddy footprints! But there wasn’t anything we could do about it unfortunately (except try and clean it in the morning). We “cruised the town” to find some food – although Cunnamulla is probably one of the larger towns of Australia with a population of 3,000, most things were shut…except the pub! We just got there in time to order pizza – we took it back to the cabin and watched the day’s video footage before going to bed at around 10ish. At around 2am, I woke up with a burning desire to go to the toilet…I raced into the ensuite, and then came back out feeling a little dehydrated – I decided to mix some powerade with the water. At the same time Macca had the same desire as I did 10mins ago – it nearly ended up being a fight over who could be in the toilet! No doubt something in the pizza didn’t agree with us, and we both decided to drink some powerade by mixing it with the water. Now this probably was not a good idea – little did we know that the water in the kitchen sink was not meant for drinking – it was bore water!!! But mixed with the powerade we didn’t taste it, we only found out in the morning when we went to brush our teeth in it. We tried to do this quietly, Greg slept through it all – Matt was another story. A bellowing roar came from underneath the sleeping bag “What the hell are you guys doing!?!?!” “Drinking some powerade” we replied, before we could mention we had an upset stomach the thunderous voice replied “Powerade at 3am in the !%@$# morning!?!?!” Of course, Matt later on said that it was the best pizza he had ever tasted…but Matt’s bad pizza experience was yet to come – karma always has its benefits.
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