Phase 1 of 'Backyard' Trip

 Finally I have a little time to sit and catch up with Phase 1 of our trip. This phase was from home to Townsville in far North Queensland.

We travel within 'executive hours' - in other words we drive for around 4-6 hours a day, or around 350  kms. It makes it for a more comfortable trip and allows time to explore the lovely little towns that we visit and stay overnight at.

To begin with, as I swear is a jinx (?) on us leaving home, we found that ' yet again' a small minor detail that kept us from leaving home at the planned time. It was a simple wire that had disconnected from the right hand indicator light on the back of the caravan (and obviously you need to have that working) we called a caravan guy and thankfully he managed to find the problem, fixed it and got us on our way just an hour later than planned. 

Our first night was spent at Lake Monduran north of Childers on the coastal road heading north. It is a lovely quiet place and a great place to unwind from first day jitters.

Had a lovely bbq dinner in the camp kitchen meeting other like minded people on the road like us.

From here, day 2 saw us continuing to head north and our overnight stop was at Marlborough, about 100kms north of Rockhampton. At Rockhampton we drove past the Spire that denotes the Tropic of Capricorn -hopefully we shall cross it again when we travel down the west coast of Western Australia in some 6 weeks time.

 This small caravan park was attached to a pub, and although we did not avail ourselves of dinner at the pub, we had a good night.

Day three saw us head towards Bowen. On the outskirts of Bowen, we past the 'Big Mango' - Bowen is known as the mango capital of Australia. It also has the unenviable title of 'Blowin' Bowen - the winds here are something else, however the lovely caravan park we pulled into had a couple of great wind breaks that sheltered us from most of the wind. Surprisingly despite the fact that the caravan park was right on the highway, the road noise at night did not really worry us.

From Bowen it was a fairly easy run into Townsville where we set up our van and Peter started doing an 'airport run' picking up several of the other guys coming here for the reunion that were flying in.

The caravan we stay at here in Townsville is a lovely one (we always stay at this one when visiting Townsville) lots of palm trees and plenty of shade.

We travelled through plenty of road works the whole way up, which made it a long stop/start journey for the four days. To be honest we were really glad to get here and relax. We also travelled through lots of lovely sugarcane fields from just south of Rockhampton. The cane looks lovely and tall, all ready for the harvesting to start in the next couple of weeks. As you can see from the following photo, they look as if they have already begun crushing the cane at the mill at Mackay.

The time came to sit and enjoy happy hour in Townsville, and getting set for the start of the army reunion yesterday (Monday) - more about that in my next post.

'Til then,

June