DAY 183 & 184 – HITTING THE ROAD TODAY – QUEENSLAND BOUND - ADRENALIN IN OVERDRIVE AS WE HEAD HOME TO SEE THE GRANDCHILDREN

The end to our adventure... We are homeward bound today, heading home to Queensland.  We felt sad to be leaving Melbourne as we have had an awesome time with the kids down here...  

On the other hand though, as we head home we are keen to get back to Brisbane to see our gorgeous grandchildren and our daughter Sarah and her husband Colin.  

We have an almost 1800km journey ahead of us and the plan was to take three days....
 It took us quite a while to get out of Melbourne, almost two hours as with traffic it was pretty slow getting out through the suburbs.  I would have hated to be doing this on a weekday as it was busy enough on the weekend.  Our destination was Parkes in NSW today, a little over 700kms.  We made good time with a stop for morning tea and lunch before finally arriving in Parkes around 5pm.  We stayed at the Showgrounds in Parkes,  At $20 a night, with power, water, and amenities we felt that it was pretty reasonably priced and as we were only there overnight we really didn't need any extras anyway as we wanted to stay hooked to the van.  

When we arrived at the Showgrounds, they were quite a crowd there as they had the New Year Eve's  trots there.  We paid for our site and were set up right near the amenities block which was handy. The aircon went on as it was a pretty hot night, but also to help drown out the noise of the races,

New Year's Eve fireworks in Parkes

 We were all ready for bed by 10.30pm as we wanted to be up and on the road by 6am the following morning.   Just as we were about to hop into bed, we head the most almighty bang and as Steve went outside to investigate, we saw the most amazing fireworks display in the sky.  

Talk about a bird's eye view,  we stood and watched it for a good half an hour.  Once they finished, the crowds dispersed and the place became quite again.   We headed for bed...

We were up early the following morning.  It was a beautiful start to a new year, we were up to see the sun rise....

Sunrise on the start of a new year.....

Showgrounds in Parkes - our overnight stay...

We got away a little after 6am and arrived in Dubbo around 9am where we stopped for a cuppa.

 Then it was on to Morree where we stopped for a lunch break...

 We had planned to get to Goodowindi where we were going to spend the night....  But we had forgotten about daylight savings, so once crossing the border we gained another hour so we were keen to just keen pushing on and getting back to Brisbane to see our beautiful grand children.  We wanted to surprise them.... 

And surprise them we did.....

So happy to see these beautiful children - and they were just as excited to see us....

 The journey has come to an end.....
We are back in Queensland with family.   We have done over 1000kms today.  It's been a long day but it is good to be back with family..... We have been running on adrenaline all day...

Now for days of catch up.   Days of fun with our grandchildren... Oh it is so good to be back....