Friday was my window for shopping! What a hectic day. I had a deadline of 6pm to get back into my place as floodwater still abounds and night crossings are dangerous. Having been over at the main homestead for nearly three weeks I was really looking forward to getting home. The trouble with heading over the border of course means that if you leave NSW at 8am you’ll arrive At Goondiwindi around the same time, while on the return home if you leave QLD at 4 you won’t get home till 6pm-and of course I was late! However with rain predicted this coming week I really tried to fit in as much as possible just in case access became difficult again. So it was off to the main street of Goondiwindi for christmas gifts with stops at stores including some nice gift shops, retravision and our local indie, The Nook & Cranny Bookshop. It was my fastest shop ever with no time for browsing. In between I had (at long last) a visit to the hairdresser, an hour in the queue at the PO and a grocery shop.

One bag of groceries mysteriously disappeared between home and Goondiwindi and having changed vehicles three times enroute through the water I have a distinct feeling it may have fallen off the back and is probably bobbing downstream towards Mungindi as I write this. I was just lucky it was the vegies and not the meat or heavens forbid… the 4X Gold. That’s our modified flood truck above. The old Hi-lux has a revamped underbody and a set of tractor tyres for extra clearance. We moved groceries from my car to David’s toyota at a neighbours place and then travelled in the toyota to the next dry spot where the hi-lux was parked under a tree. As you can see the esky of meat and the first case of cans were on the back first.

After we crossed the bridge – with .5 of a metre of water over it (no photo here I was a touch nervous) We hit the next crossing. A piece of tarp tied to the bull bar actually does a good job of keeping water out of the radiator and the air intake; that’s what David is unfurling as I sit wedged beneath the shopping.  And this next lot of water sits at about .6 of a metre. The gravel has been washed away leaving a boggy bottom that requires exact navigation so you don’t slid off the the remainder of the water covered road. Home at last… By the time we unpacked and sat down for dinner it was 9pm. Thank heavens for BBQ chicken; pity about the lack of salad things to go with it….