When we arrived the wind was blowing hard from the southwest but we enthusiastically put up the camper to provide us with the most shelter possible and opened a bottle of sherry for some inner warmth. Too cold by then to even consider lighting a fire, just get into bed and try to warm up. Well, that took most of the night but by morning it was pretty cosy inside our camper trailer snuggled up with a lambs wool underlay, feather and down doona and as much clothing as we could comfortably sleep in. But we had to get the fire going! So we put on our now very cold clothes and jackets, four layers in all I think, and set out to light the fire. Fortunately we had brought kindling and firewood with us so it should have been easy. But the ground was so cold that it didn't light easily but it certainly smoked a lot. I thought we should take some photos of our camping site while we were waiting for the fire to heat up enough to cook breakfast but after this shot (the only one) the camera was so cold the mechanism wouldn't work so no more photos.
A hot fire eventually provided us with a wonderful cooked breakfast at about 10 o'clock, right down to toasted fruit loaf. We spent the morning sitting in the sun in the shelter of the camper, there was no wind blowing so we were pretty happy. We had driven across to the town of Texas to get the papers and had a lovely lazy morning. Lunch was around a really good fire at about 1.30 and at about 2 o'clock it was starting to get a bit cool which made me really nervous of what was ahead for that night. Just before 3 o'clock we both started to say together that maybe we should consider going home tomorrow as it really wasn't terribly comfortable and within a few minutes we had decided that we would be better off going home that night, in fact straight away! I didn't realize how fast we could get packed up and away but by 4 o'clock we were in the car and on our way home.
It was a long way home over the mountains from Tenterfield in the dark but it was wonderful to slide into our nice warm bed at about 9 o'clock.
Needless to say a post camping family meeting has unanimously decided that there is to be no camping south of the Tropic of Capricorn between the months of April and October.
