7th April. St George, Queensland. HOT,

The road from Lightning Ridge to St George is very good, we had lost a washer for the stableiiser bars of the caravan so this nessitated a stop at Mitre 10. Very expensive .... 40 cents! Now we carry a couple of spares! While Brian was making this major purchase, I made a mighty major 'ROYAL WE' decision, no free camping tonight, a powered sight so we could have air conditioning. I felt empowered!

Pelican's Rest Top Tourist Park was beautiful, even had green grass! With aircon on I made salad AND coleslaw ready for tea then we set out touristing. St George is on the Ballon River, small town, nicely laid out. The main industry is Tourism, Fishing and cotton growing.

We wondered what the low growing dark green fields were....

Found out that it was Cotton. There was a lot of white fluffy stuff on the roadside & it felt like wool but it didn't make sense, now we know it's cotton. It requires a huge amount of water, irrigation channels from great holding damns & it it very labor intensive.

We saw it growing in all its stages, planting, very green, green with a little white, brown dried out looking covered in white, then the harvested dry stalks.

It is harvested by mighty machines into bales that can be seen all over the area. They are bright yellow and must be very heavy w    And the as the Roadtrains can only carry 5 rolls per trailer.

In some of the fields which must be thousands of acres big, there are Container size bricks of cotton covered in plastic.

We also drove past the Cotton Gin.

All most interesting. Sorry, but Sugar Cane is my first love!