Back on 19th July we stayed for several nights at Moree, at the Gwydir Carapark, which is a pretty big caravan park with lots of cabins, as well. Very popular with the grey nomads such as ourselves. Some people just come here and stay for weeks!
Well, the first thing that happened was that I was backing in the caravan, aided by Glenyce, when the bloke next door yelled out “Aye!!” or something like that. What had happened was that they had placed the tap for our water supply low down on the ground, so that it’s easy to miss. Which means that it’s easy to hit, because it was only wrapped with a little bit of white plastic bag. In any other caravan park, when they do this, they mount the tap at waist height, usually attached to a stout white post. And even then , I’ve observed another unfortunate caravanner, in Merimbula, years ago, knock the whole lot over and break off the tap, causing a fountain and water loss for the rest of us, for a while, util they plugged it.
Anyway, I did hit the bloody thing and didn’t hurt my van and slightly bent over the tap, which did work, as you can see, because our white water hose is attached to it in this picture:-
We had quite a good time at this caravan park, as you can see in a picture I’ve already placed in a previous post in this blog.
I’ve taken pictures of the various pools at four different temperatures, not including a long, lap pool, which was at a comfortable 28 ℃. Here is the pool at 34 ℃, as the sign says:-
Here’s the one at 35 ℃:
And here is the slightly more uncomfortable pool at 37 ℃:
And the hotty at 39 ℃. This one has a sign warning you to not use it for very long, especially if you have problems with heart or circulation.
At Lightning Ridge, there is a hot artesian pool open 24 hours a day. We didn’t go there because we were tired from another tour, but they say there are a lot of warning signs, because the water is well over 40 ℃.
All of this region of NSW and Queensland has hot artesian water. In many regions it is full of dissolved salts from the underground regions it has traversed. The water IN the Great Artesian Basin has originated from rainfall on the Great Dividing Ranges, and Wikipedia tells me that much of it has travelled underground for up to 2 million years before emerging from the ground. It travels through water-bearing rock such as sandstones which have been capped by later laying down of marine sedimentary rocks impervious to water.
I did notice that the artesian water in which we luxuriated has not been chlorinated, so I hope it has been sanitised by some method such as ozonation, etc . Or maybe not!
As a matter of interest, I might add that this particular blog item took over 2 hours to do, including the graphics and such things as looking up how to do the ℃ sign in HTML code, because this laptop keyboard doesn’t have a separate numeric keypad of numerals which I usually use together with the Alt key to get non-standard characters. It all adds up, and my bum is aching – the chair in this caravan is not the most comfortable. Hope you enjoy reading it – I wrote it here in Rockhampton, where we’ve had a 3-night rest. Now we have to decide whether to go up the coast to Cairns, or inland a bit, such as to Emerald, then up to Charters Towers. Oh well – the weary life of the traveller …