The people at the Crows Nest Caravan Park are very attentive to their customers. Before breakfast we were visited by the lady and offered free fresh muffins.
We headed north intending to check out the remaining sites along the New England Highway. The first rest area couldn't be found, the second wasn't listed and the third was not what was described in "The Book". The fourth was the Swinging Bridge Park in Cooyar where we stopped for smoko.
The road was pretty bumpy forcing us to slow down, to 50 kph (30 mph) at times. Happily it improved when we got to the top of the plateau.
We moved on to Yarraman and then Blackall where we booked into the caravan park as a response to the expected low overnight temperature.
Our plan was to check out some land we had seen advertised in the local paper at Ferny Hills. The salesman had wanted to give us a presentation about the investment potential of the land before taking us to Blackbutt to see it.
I did a sweep of the area and found the land and picked up Jean to take her to see it. We don't really want to settle in Blackall but we need to calibrate the market and the sales people.
On the way we stopped to chat to a motorhomer from Brisbane who has put an old house from elsewhere on a block and is remodelling it. It caught my eye because it is a small house with verandahs all round something like the house we might like eventually. The owner was in so we stopped for a chat and got some very useful information from him about the upside and the downside of moving and remodelling an old house. One interesting fact was the price he paid for the land less than a year ago, about half the current market price.
We visited the land the developer is offering and found it quite to be different from the description the salesman had given us. The blocks "full of eucalypts and grass trees" were in reality pretty much cow pasture with a few smallish trees and the odd dam. On the two blocks still for sale the dams had been built by an incompetent and there was no water in them. There is a bitumen road and a power line going past all the blocks but the outlook is not much to write home about. The development is quite extensive and I find it hard to imagine what it will be like in five years time. Presumably most of the 37 blocks will then have houses on them and the character of the place will have changed a lot.
We had gained a lot of knowledge both from the motorhomer and from the visit to the development and will be better able to understand what we are faced with in our search for a piece of land. My guess is we will buy a block in some place which rings some bells for us in an area where the prices haven't yet doubled.