Lake Moogerah, QLD 27-29 August, 2021
- Ken Fredric
- Aug 27, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 29, 2023
Day 1 - Scarborough - Moogerah
Our journey started around 9 a.m. on Friday morning, headed for Lake Moogerah via the Overflow Estate 1895 Winery for lunch.
After picking up Matariki from storage in Rothwell we drove on the Gateway, past Beaudesert, to the winery, arriving at our booked time of 11 a.m.
The Overflow Estate 1895 Winery sits on the banks of Lake Wyaralong, in Queensland’s Scenic Rim area.
We started our leisurely lunch by trying a couple of the estate’s wines, rosé for me and a tempranillo for Meg. Very nice, dry wines.
We’d ordered a charcuterie plate, which arrived about 30 minutes after we arrived, giving us plenty of time to first savour the local wine and the beautiful surroundings before eating.
The food was amazing with various meats, cheeses, pickled things (not sure what they all were), bread, crackers etc., and we managed to eat it all, despite it being quite a large meal for a lunch. All that was washed down with another round of their lovely wine.
After lunch we hit the road again and drove to Boonah first to pick up some beer, which I’d forgotten to pack, then continued on to the Moogerah Lakeside Bush Retreat campground, where we’d booked a non-powered site for two nights.
We were able to park in any area that took our fancy, so we found a semi-level spot amongst some trees that required our first use of the levelling ramps. We had a nice view of the lake and surrounding hills, and we were about 100 metres away from the lake.
We stayed outside relaxing for as long as possible before the cold wind drove us inside for the night.
I watched the Warriors vs Raiders footy game (usual disappointing result, but at least they’re consistent!).
On our first outing to Imbil we didn’t have a clock near the beds so we didn’t know what the time was when we woke up during the night. We packed a travel clock for this trip and set it before going to bed. We were woken by the alarm clock at 1:00 a.m, even though the alarm function was switched off! There may have been some cursing for a while after being rudely awoken.
Day 2 - Moogerah
We woke to a cold 6℃ morning, and hadn’t yet figured out the diesel heater, so we stayed in bed for a while until the temperature rose to 8℃. Positively balmy!
After brekky we went down to the lake to check out our surroundings. There were a couple of boats out on the lake, a few people playing around the water’s edge, and it was beautiful and warm in the full sun.
Back at the motorhome, we spent the morning checking out our ability to change a flat tyre and getting used to the tools and jacking points etc.
Then we moved on to learning about the onboard air compressor, which can inflate and deflate the tyres for different driving conditions. It was a great learning experience, particularly when we were finished and were putting all the equipment away again, and uncoupled the compressor hose from the compressor without releasing the air in the line first. The hose coupling shot out of the compressor and thankfully went directly up into the underside of the lined bonnet, and not into Meg’s face as she was standing right beside the compressor!
Our brains were hurting by that point so we relaxed for the rest of the afternoon.
While relaxing we were entertained by some small children who'd gone down to the lake, one walking and one on a bike, being attacked by the rabid magpies that were living the campground trees near the lake. What appeared to be a slightly older girl did a runner from the lake back to the campground and left what we took to be her younger brother at the mercy of the magpies. We could've gone to their assistance of course, but where's the fun in that!
We had a couple of drinks before dinner while doing an IT Support call to Russell, who was at Ascot Tce looking after Mum and Dad, to try and help resolve their wi-fi/internet issues.
Dinner was Meg’s wonderful, original recipe Spaghetti Bolognese.
Up until this point our motorhome internet had been working fine, with only one or two hiccups before I switched it to 2.4Ghz rather than 5Ghz.
At 7:00 p.m. we joined other Gleeson family members for a Zoom trivia night.
Unfortunately our technology let us down with our wi-fi internet connection dropping out on the laptop, so we missed some of the early rounds of questions.
We had to resort to using my mobile on mobile data to finish the quiz. Goes without saying we weren’t even close to winning any prizes!
We figured out how to operate and set the diesel heater to come on in the morning, so it would be warm before we got out of bed. We set the heater to come on at 6:30 a.m. Sunday morning.
Day 3 - Moogerah - Scarborough
We woke around 6:45 a.m. with no diesel heater going and a temperature of about 6℃! I had to race out of bed and push the heater button to crank it up. The heater is very efficient, if a bit noisy, and had us warmed up in 20 minutes. Turns out that every time you switch the Air Heater switch off on the main control panel, that resets the date/time on the heater control panel. Lesson learnt!
After our usual morning routine we started the cleanup and departure process.
The Moogerah campground didn’t have any facilities to empty the toilet cassette and grey water, so when we left there around 9:00 a.m. we first headed to the small town of Kalbar to use the free dump point facilities in their showgrounds.
Once that was done we drove back to civilisation via the Cunningham Highway, Legacy Tunnel, Airport Link Tunnel and the Gateway.
We arrived home about 12:30 p.m. after dropping Matariki off at Rothwell.
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