Today, despite a poor start which I will report later, was great. Once again I have crossed the Blue Mountsins heading west and the scenery was nice, very nice and at times magnificent.  The greenery and the rolling hills really are something to bottle and take home. I stopped a few times at lookouts and enjoyed conversations with fellow travellers who were all going in the opposite direction to me. At one stop there were bell birds singing or should I say peeling as they sounded exactly like bells. The first time that I heard them I thought that something under my bonnet was making the noise until someone else who was at the same stop told me what it was. The driving, as I have said previously, requires lots of serious concentration particularly when on a narrow, barely two vehicles wide, one is confronted by huge two trailer trucks on very narrow bends. I had a period when there were five of them over a fairly short period of time and I actually got almost off the road and stopped for them, or most of them. Quite a few of the bends are actually hairpin bends with recomended speeds as low as twenty kilometres per hour! Anyway it was a lovely drive and I am now camped at Glen Innes Showgrounds, you will note that a lot of towns are using their Showgrounds for low cost parking.

Back to the start of the day. Last night I had to change gas bottles quite late at night, it seems that they always run out at night, just Murphy’s law I guess. Anyway it meant that I only got two days out of the last bottle and I have been getting very poor life out of the gas bottles for a week or two. At first I thought that I had just had a couple of bad (short) fills. I get my bottles refilled as one gets better fills that way as opposed to the swap system for varying reasons and it is generally a bit cheaper. Anyway I suspected a leak and had had a look previously and decided that it was just the fills, but this very short bottle life made me look again and look harder. I found a leak then attempted unsuccessfully to fix it. So off to the local gas fitter who discovered that it was actually the regulator, which controls the gas flow, and that it needed replacing. So that was done without much drama and off I went about an hour later than usual.