Leaving Colbar early, we were hoping to make Toowoomba by nightfall. It didn’t turn out that way; we didn’t want to have the same experience as the previous night, so we decided to spend the night in St George. It had been over one year since I last left Queensland. It felt good to be back. A part of me belonged there, and felt at home.
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We had been warned not to drive through the outback past sunset. Initially I had thought “surely driving here can’t be much worse than driving between Brisbane and Cairns” (which I had done overnight on many an occasion), but I was proven wrong.
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After Broken Hill we once more hooked a right and headed for Brisbane. Our Tom Tom (which wasn’t much use to us in the outback, but came in very handy in the major cities) indicated that we had 585km of straight roads ahead of us.
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After Mildura we went bush. Outback country here. Before you know it there really isn’t much around you except red earth, straight roads and sparse traffic. In fact, when encountering more than a handful of cars you started getting the idea that the “roads were busy.”
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Our last stop on the Great Ocean Road was Warrnambool, where the legendary Mahagony Ship is said to be located (if the legend is true, it would cast a different light on the discovery of Australia by Europeans). Here we changed direction and headed north towards Broken Hill. It felt strange to actually “hook a right” and turn 90 degrees with a straight road leading us towards the heart of the country.
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