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Stanthorpe and Disaster

Stanthorpe has lots of well-known parks for south-east Queenslanders so it was a little disappointing to find out that Girraween National Park was closed for camping. Sundown national park was open but there were no options for camping with a camper trailer in the national park (or so it would seem according to Queensland National Parks). However, given this nuisance, we gave Wikicamps a go and picked the Top of Town caravan park in Stanthorpe. Wikicamps seems to be the goto application for general camping information but we did notice that some national parks are not included, but maybe this is because the content is somewhat user-contributed?

Stanthorpe is a lovely old town near the top (The Summit is the top) of the great dividing range. While it’s not the highest point in Queensland (Ravenshoe is) it is cooler and home to the parks as well as Queensland’s Granite Belt wine and apple region. While we’re not wine buffs our impression of Queensland wines has been that they’re pretty rubbish, but, as discussed with the Ballendean owner this is a typical impression of Australians who haven’t tried Queensland wine.

As it so turns out we were indeed wrong, the wine from both Ballendean and Golden Grove estates was tasty and interesting, our picks were the Barbera at Golden Grove and the Saperavi Durif at Ballendean.

Aside from the wines we spent a half a day riding through Stanthorpe and the lovely Quart Pot creek area, this looks like it’ll have some new bike paths soon so it should be great. While we weren’t expecting a challenging mountain bike track the old (what appeared to be disused) walking path heading south-east was… extremely challenging.

We also dropped in at the Granite Belt Brewery which has an excellent session ale and the cider is also good, however, we’d pass on the merlot sour. We were surprised about how much of a lovely bar and restaurant they had. Were we to spend a bit more time in Stanthorpe we’d make an effort to go.

The parks themselves are great, and at the moment (February 2020) they’ve received a huge amount of rain and as a result, the rock pools are all full of water and there is an abundance of moss and beautiful new plant growth. The best part, is simply that at ~900 m it’s a darn site cooler than Brisbane.

The conclusion we came to is that given Stanthorpe is not too far from Brisbane we could come back again (most likely next year) to check out promised snow and wildflowers.

Our departure day from Stanthorpe was a lovely sunny day. It rained the night before so it was great to catch some sun and let the canvas of the camper to dry up before we packed it. Very excited about our next stopover (Kwiambal National Park) we left Stanthorpe. Blissfully unaware of what was ahead of us we were driving through the range enjoying green meadows with wildflowers when all of a sudden we ran out of luck and our LandCruiser refused to shift out of third gear…

Moments before what seemed to be smooth sailing ended

Hoping it was just a temporary stubbornness of the car – it loves the attention that car – we continued on hoping it would change its mind and change back to normal. Alas, it was not the case…

Since turning around in third gear on a narrow road with a camper in tow and no possible way to go in reverse, the only way forward for our journey.. was forward. Texas was the closest town, and thanks to the road workers who reassured us that there was a mechanic in Texas.

We had always anticipated some form of car failure, remembering that vintage cars – no matter their reputation – are more than capable of causing issues. However, we had figured that once out of the cities and in the country we’d be able to work with mechanics to complete the repairs. This delusional interpretation now faced reality. The reality of which was that mechanics in Texas had absolutely no interest in helping. We guess they’re there to make money, and assisting a traveller with an old car is just trouble, trouble that they don’t want. Presumably, dealer repair jobs, or insurance jobs and stranded travellers are more the order of the day. This left us stymied, with the real world crushing our delusionary world and the generous offer of waiting two weeks till someone could take a look, a look mind you, not even a fix. Alternatively, we were generously offered to be towed to Brisbane at the cheap rate of ~$11 dollars per km (a nice $3,000 tow).

About 5 seconds after the tow offer, we placed her in low range to take off, and high to drive and left Texas. At roughly 60 km/h we would’ve been a nuisance on the highways so we picked a quiet set of roads to return on although this did increase the distance a little. I think the gearbox was just bad luck as there were no other issues, even revving the car pretty high at 3200 rpm (high for a 13B-T) for 5 hours didn’t seem to worry the old 40. The minor dirt roads and the many flooded crossings through Millmerren provided little challenge even with only a single gear.

On the road, we considered the options of repairing/switching out the gearbox (we have two working spares) but came to the conclusion that while this would fix our immediate problem, it would not fix the problem with Australia, and to assume that we would require no further assistance would be foolish.

It was a sad moment to leave the 40 series LandCruiser on the mountain. We had put a lot of effort into the car but hadn’t anticipated the gearbox failure (mind you, we had been interested in having the gearbox reconditioned but were advised that since it was recently rebuilt and sounded good it should have been fine for the trip). We could only take the positives of this away, however, had we been 1000 km into the trip the 5-hour drive on backroads would’ve been 20 hours (or maybe a generous $11,000 tow, thanks guys).

With the LandCruiser parked and resting we hooked the Ultimate up to the Pajero rescue car and returned to Brisbane. Now it was time for a re-think and potential purchase of a replacement vehicle.

Kent Mountain Rains and Onward to Stanthorpe

Rinse and repeat as they say, whoever they are. Friday found us back at Kent Mountain again but this time for real… real you say.

So the summary is this if you’re preparing to travel for six months, organising everything on the home front in one and a bit days is a little tight. Sure, we’d covered all of the major stuff but it was the tidy up and finalisation of items like tax and power/water/house that actually needed more time. Also try to avoid adding shipping a car also on the same day as you’re departing…

The upside of this was that when we finally got away the road was kind, the car was shipped and the family all turned up at the mountain. Only mistakes were checking the foundation strength of a support pillar of a house with the side of the Ultimate. Don’t take tight turns immediately after installing extension mirrors. The Ultimate is strong… but the external power adapter and the awning beam stay holder are not as strong as house supports. A few rivets later, and it was history with some egos bruised.

For several years the Darling Downs have been dry, this meant that Kent mountain was pretty brown and hard to enjoy. Now, however, the rains have come and the mountain is lush and green.

The mountain was good fun as usual, shashlyk was had and the main thing!

There was some drizzle which made any bare soil extremely sticky. They say that if you stick to the downs in the dry, it’ll stick to you in the wet!

The Ultimate seemed to redeem its itself with respect to the hot water system and we let it run for roughly a day to ‘burn-in’ you may say. This seemed to improve things but it still seemed a little finickity.

Collecting a few more parts from the spare LandCruiser (which was at the mountain) left us mostly ready to move on.

The drive from Nobby through to Stanthorpe was pretty easy, although for the LandCruiser this meant another slog of uphill climbing, which it coped with well.

Driving through Warwick was quite convenient as we stopped at Bunnings for some extra tools and supplies.

After we left for Stanthorpe we realised that all spares bought we’d doubled up on as were some additional fan belts and spares left at the mountain from the previous trip to Cape York (for a 40 series LandCruiser a complete list of spares and bits we took is here). This meant a quick return trip in the evening (less van) and a dinner at Soban House in Warwick which was very tasty.