Image 1: Neville leaving home for a month, at 12:00 p.m. 8 April 2023
It was the day after my eldest daughter’s wedding, and I had to get away. I needed to be in Canberra on Tuesday anyway, and leaving on Saturday meant that I could have one of those road adventures where you just do not know where you would end up. It was a late start. Most of my packing happened the night before, however, I was diligent to keep up with my emails and posts. Furthermore, and this time, I wanted to ensure that I had everything I might need for a journey which would keep me away from home for a month. I left the driveway at 12.00 p.m., and even then, I was at Browns Plains Officeworks, for 40 minutes, to fix a faulty camera card for my dash-cam, as well as print out some papers.
Image 2: Border Loop Lookout Panel, Border Range National Park
There are several ways to Canberra, and a few border crossings. Due South is the crossing on the Scenic Rim in the region of Kyogle. There is the famous border loop where the NSW-QLD railway line loops under itself through the mountainous tunnel, and, from the viewing platform in the National Park, you have the scenery of the luscious green valley towards the Richmond River. My journey was not the direct route but it headed south down through the Northern Rivers region to Casino, also on the Richmond River, and then up the range to Tenterfield, on the western leg with the sun on the low. Just over a year ago the river region was a place of massive devastation, in the great flooding that South-East Queensland and Northern coastal New South Wales is famous for.
From Tenterfield, it was a fairly short evening drive to Glen Innes, stopping for the ‘lou’ at Deepwater. The dusk drives anywhere in Australia is spectacular, but the rolling hills of the New England highway gives it a certain magnitude, looking out to the last light from the red-glowing western plains.
Neville Buch