Our hotel stay was probably a little more communal than we would normally like, but we both slept pretty well, despite a bit of chatter outside the room. It was nonetheless cheap and and did the job. Goomeri has a somewhat famous bakery that make a pretty good coffee and I had a Chicken and Fetta pastry and DEb had an Almond Cinnamon scroll. We agreed the bakery deserved it’s reputation. We took a quick drive around town and spotted the old bank building and the obligatory country church.
We didn’t have a lot planned for today, so did a bit of googling and thought that Kinbombi Falls might be worth a visit. Of course, we didn’t take into account that during a drought that there may not be any water. This turned out to be correct, but we did the walk to the bottom of the gorge anyway. I’m sure it would be quite spectacular with water.
We had a bit of time to kill so we drove a bit of a circuit through to Kilkivan and had a coffee and some morning tea before circling back toward Goomeri. Kilkivan started its life as a gold mining town during the gold rush of 1840s. These days it’s industries are forestry and cattle farming.
The South Burnett Region has been trying to set up a wine industry for a number of years, but I think probably spent too much time trying to mimic the wine regions of southern Australia in quite differing conditions. I’d sampled some of these wines about 15 years ago and was largely underwhelmed. Deb had planned lunch at the Dusty Hill winery, so we dropped in to Barambah Wines and sampled a few. I was pleasantly surprised, particularly with the Sangiovese and Tempranillo wines.
Our trip to Dusty Hill was shorter than expected. One thing we have found is that with so many people travelling locally, these regional venue operators are a bit un prepared for the volume of visitors. That combined with the limits of their COVID plans means they have to turn people away and sometimes that is not done with the best customer service outcomes in mind. So we headed in to Murgon instead and found the only place that was open was the RSL club.
To wrap our day we dropped in to the Bjelke Peterson Dam named after a former Queensland Premier who polarises people between those who believe he was lucky to escape jail for corruption and those who believe he brought large amounts of investment. Maybe both is closer to the truth.
The Dam is currently sitting at 12.7% capacity, so hopefully the upcoming la Nina can fill it up again. It did get to %195 capacity in 2011.
Given our record of challenges for eating venues, we booked into the Grand Hotel for dinner. I am still wondering why the chef is here… the meals are amazing, even if the ambience isn’t.
We’re off up the road tomorrow … stay tuned.
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