Longreach to Aramac, Torrens Creek, Charters Towers and Townsville

Long drive planned from central north QLD to the coast over the last few days. We left Winton after breaky yesterday and after checking out the Qantas museum in Longreach in the afternoon, pushed on for an overnight stopover at Aramac. Left Aramac for Torrens Creek and beyond this morning with a full tank of fuel, only to discover (a) the road was a rough single lane road - no probs, just had to really concentrate and be prepared to get off the road when faced with four-trailer road trains barrelling towards us, (b) we were fighting very strong winds - not good, fuel economy towing a caravan is bad enough, but fighting a headwind whilst towing a big brick is really bad for fuel consumption, and lastly (c) the 30km of road that we knew to be unsealed, was in a pretty poor state. Like most of the other unsealed outback roads we've been on, it was a  mix of rocks, corrugations, patches of bull-dust and sections of deeeeeep loose sand. One bloke in a Navara overtook us in a great cloud of dust and then promptly completly destroyed a tyre and rim! All of which resulted in challenging driving, bouncing and sliding and trying to stop the van overtaking us, and absolutely horrendous fuel economy - average of 29l/100km! At one stage whist wallowing in a deep sandy patch I glanced at the trip computer and spotted 55l/100km!  Lucky it was only a short 30km section that was unsealed. No complaints from the old Territory, it happily powered along as usual, except that it went through virtually the whole tank of fuel in 270km. We arrived at the  Torrens Creek servo with 30km of fuel left, only to find that both the servos in town had given up and closed, permanently. Nearest fuel was 51km away! Hmmm, could be a problem! The long and short of it was that I left Heth, the boys and  the van behind and took off for the next town in ultra-fuel economy mode. Made it comfortably, but there's no way I would have made it dragging the van into the wind. In nearly 11,000 km travelling so far this trip, today was the first time our Hema maps and fuel apps have let us down, but it turned out OK in the end, just cost us an hour and a half. The rest of the day went smoothly and we arrived in Townsville for tea. The car and caravan now have another layer of orange paint protection! I hope the stains will come out!