Gismo Queen and her King

Emerald - Sunday 19th August

Today was possibly Greg's favourite day of the trip so far, even though we had to say goodbye to Neill and Jude - for a few weeks anyway.


We were up early as a caravan park pack up takes longer than a roadside stop. We waved Neill and Jude off at 8:45am and drove out of the park ourselves quarter of an hour later. The shortest day's drive of our trip so far saw us pulling into Ally and Terry's backyard 20 minutes later. a quick set up and then we jumped into Ally's car for the drive out to their farm, Glencoe.
Glencoe is a 10,000 acre dryland farm north of Emerald, where Terry and Ally are currently growing wheat and chickpeas, and have just harvested sorghum. It was quite pretty as it wasn't just flat paddocks of crops - there are some slight hills, the magnificent Peak Range in the background, the odd spot of vegetatin (which now has to be managed) - like these bottle trees - and of course the gently waving crops.
First, we had smoko in the shed (where Greg had shed envy at the size of the shed - but when you need to park seeders and hervesters the size of those, you need a very big shed) and then set off for the tour of the farm. Given how long it is since they have had rain, the crops were looking very good. Terry provided a very interesting commentary and we appreciated the scale of this sort of farming.


Then it was time to leave Terry to his farming duties for the afternoon and we headed back to Emerald for lunch. Ally took us via Capella, a small town nearby where she was born and showed us her childhood haunts.


Ally left us when we got back as she was heading to Yeppoon today. We had a pleasant lunch in the sun, did some washing, reading and general relaxing before we joined Terry for dinner at the house. Another lovely evening swapping stories - including discovering we had Rotary in common. Tomorrow we head to Yeppoon to catch up with Maggy and Ally.

posted by Tracey @ 8:11 am