May 24, Day 30

Hi everyone

We're still in Townsville, as predicted, and Geoff starts working on Monday at a local workshop doing heavy fabrication.

We have enjoyed beautiful warm weather while back home has experienced an extremely wet month, thankfully no damage at home.  Anyone want to come up on holiday? Join us, it's warm and dry.

We are still planning on continuing north towards the end of next month but haven't made any firm plans on locations yet. Unfortunately we are running into school holidays so may have to go west to less popular destinations then back to the coast, we'll just play it by ear.  It's all good.

Rockhampton Police called us the other day to say they found the guy that side swiped us, he's from Victoria and "quite happy to swap insurance details", yeah, only because he got caught. We didn't talk to the driver, just passed on his details, we'll let the insurance company deal with him.  I'm just grateful the police found him. Our new bull bar is on order and should be fitted sometime this week, just as well it was insured, $2200 would have wrecked the budget a bit.

We're still working on the wiring problem, it's not blowing fuses anymore, but now we have no side lights and something wrong with the trailer brakes. It's all over my head. We now have new LED tail lights and new wiring but still an issue.

Cheers for now

Shell

May 14, Day 20

While St Helen's Beach is nice and scenic, the sandflies are absolutely ruthless. My hands and feet are covered in bites and sooo itchy. I've had to get anti-histamine tablets just to be able to sleep through the night without scratching. Erin and Geoff were bitten too, but they were lucky and not affected as badly.

Geoff tried out some crab pots but only caught a jenny and an undersize crab so came back empty handed. Better luck next time.

We are now in Townsville for at least the next 5-6 weeks, hopefully we will be able to find work to top up the funds and then we'll head to Cairns to meet up with friends and my brother and his family.

May 12, Day 18

We took the Sarina-Marlborough Road from the Hotel and got about 5km before I remember that I hadn't latched the bike rack back into position and put the pin in to secure it. I quickly pulled up and checked and, sure enough, the bikes and rack were still angled back against the spare on the trailer and unlocked, no pin to be seen, not that I expected to find it as I had left it on the rear bumper.

Back we went to the hotel and retraced our steps. The hotel grounds had just been mowed so there was little chance of finding it there. We had pulled over a few hundred metres up the road to ring Mum and Dad so we checked there as well and found it on the road. Luck seemed to be on our side, I don't know how it managed to stay on the bumper for so long, we had crossed rail lines and pot holes before parking at this spot. The pin now has a chain on it so that if it happens again (which it shouldn't), it's not going anywhere.

Well I didn't know what to expect when we decided to stop at Lake Elphinstone for a few days to catch up on things, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find a very nice little oasis in the middle of nowhere.

Erin met a couple of families with girls her age and they took her out on their ski boat and she got to try tubing for the first time. Sunday got very busy with the locals coming for a day out water skiing but by 5pm we were back to just us and a few grey nomads camped at either end of the park.

Lake Elphinstone is another free campground with drinking water, toilets and showers, unfortunately we didn't find the donkey to heat the water until the last day otherwise we could've enjoyed hot showers. People that we met told us that 3 yrs ago the lake was so dry you could walk across it, now it's full and the water line is above the tree line so there are paperbark trees 20m from the shore. We were up at dawn every morning watching the sun rise over the water and learning how to operate the manual functions of our camera to take the best photos. At night, we were doing the same with the full moon rising. Highly recommend this camp to anyone going through.

Today we passed through Mackay to pick up some more parts to try and fix our wiring issue - now when we use our left indicator we blow the fuse for that too. That's on my to-do list for Townsville.

We had planned to go to Eungella Dam for a couple of nights but decided to try St Helen's Beach Camping Reserve (near Calen) instead to give Erin some ocean for a change of scenery. The sign at the park says $17 per night, fees collected daily but apparently no one has collected fees in month, so another budget stay – and more cold showers.

May 8, Day 14

Well Rockhampton certainly didn't go to plan. We managed to get all our shopping done that we needed, including a warmer doona for Erin and we were ready to continue north by about 2.30pm. We had parked on the main road outside Stockland Shopping Centre because we didn't want to try and tow the trailer around the shopping centre car park. When we got back out to the car, we found a note on our windscreen to say a woman had seen a delivery truck side-swipe our 4wd and keep going. We quickly ran around to see how much damage was done, because we hadn't noticed anything while packing the groceries away in the trailer and Geoff hadn't noticed anything from the back of the car to the driver's door. The side of our bull bar was torn and twisted and amazingly no other damage was found.  We were parked behind two other cars and in front of another one but he had managed to miss everything else, just clipping our bull bar, but with enough force to write it off. We were directed to centre management for more information. The lady at centre management gave us the witness's phone number and the rego number that she'd received so we could go to the police and make a report. It turned out that the rego number didn't belong to any vehicle and when the witness was called, she said that the boys in the car with her had told her the number and she'd only seen that it was a truck.

We left Rocky about 4pm feeling quite angry and frustrated at how some people could be such bastards. We had to find somewhere to stay reasonably close as we still had a short in the trailer and therefore no tail lights so no night driving. We decided to stay behind the Marlborough Hotel, $12 per night with hot showers sounded very good to us. Tomorrow we'll look for somewhere a little further away from civilisation and crazy truck drivers.

May 7, Day 13

Back at Duaringa again to get a net-fix. The last three nights at Blackdown NP were fantastic, well worth the trip out there. We camped at Campsite 11 which was the best sized one we found for our camper and Erin's tent. There was only a few other campers there, but the campsites are quite far apart so you almost feel like you have the place to yourself.

Our first morning we woke to the sounds of swooping wings over our camper. We got up and found ourselves surrounded by Currawongs, all vying for attention … and food.  We certainly noticed the difference in temperature, Erin had four layers of clothes and beanie and gloves.

We did all but one of the walks (the one from Horseshoe lookout) and took hundreds of photos.  We showed Erin how to use the macro function and between us managed to take some really nice floral close-ups.

We came back from one of the walks to find our dish sponge missing, a search through the surrounding long grass found it about 30 metres away, near the next campsite. Gotta watch those currawongs. Erin's the most annoyed, she has bird poo on her chair and tent that has to be cleaned off. She's taking it personally.

We also got adventurous and drove the 19km 4wd loop road. At one point, the road was so steep in front of us, that we couldn't see it over the bonnet. That was enough for Erin, she was gone and walking ahead of us, skating down the road on her backside, the pea gravel was too much for her to walk on. I went down with her and filmed Geoff driving down so he could see his pride and joy in action.

Off to Rockhampton tomorrow to get my shopping fix. Not that I enjoy shopping that much, but we do need to pick up some things. I didn't realise how much Erin has grown this year and she has grown out of her winter clothes already.

Shell

May 4, Day 10

Our stay at Duaringa let us catch up on school work, laundry and general housekeeping. Not to mention finding a power point and catching up on some internet time, unfortunately we forgot to update the blog.

As we were about to leave for Blackdown, we found we had an electrical short in the tail lights, or the adaptor between the landcruiser and trailer. I tried for 1 ½ hours and several fuses to fix the so-and-so but could not find the problem. I still have blinkers and stop lights and not night-driving so we'll continue on to Blackdown with problem unsolved until we get to Rocky. I'll sort the problem out after I make a new electrical adaptor rather than trust a store bought one again.

On a better note, met a bloke by the name of Mick while at Duaringa. He and Shell set up a hub at the picnic table connecting two laptops and three external hard-drives so Shell could copy some movies and music from him. Mick had something like 30,000 songs and a couple hundred movies, kid's and adult alike. He was one of those characters that at first sight, look a little dubious, but once met turn out to be real nice blokes, just goes to show, you can't judge a person at first glance.

We also met a couple of ladies in motorhomes camped next to us. We enjoyed their company so much, we invited ourselves to dinner with them at the local golf club.

Geoff

April 27 - May 2

Day 8

Well 1 week down, let's hope many more to go. After leaving Glebe Weir, we filled up at Moura and had lunch just west of town at the Dawson River rest area.

We spoke to a bloke there who had just paid $1.09 for diesel at Banana. He reckons he'll take his receipt to the depot at Rocky where he usually gets his fuel and ask why they charge him more where it gets received than out west where it gets delivered to.

From there we went to Baralaba where we stayed for 3 nights. Very nice camping and rest area on the backs of the Dawson River. Lots of bindii but water in the river was lovely and clean, didn't catch anything but not for want of trying.  Showers and toilets were nice and clean, much to the credit of the council guys that handle the upkeep of them.  We spoke to a couple of them and they were really nice blokes. They said ignore the 48hour rule, they think some of the southern visitors made that up to have the park for themselves when they come up to stay, there's no limit as long as you respect the park and town.

From Baralaba, we drove to Blackwater to pick up some groceries and mail off some of Erin's school work. We had planned to go to Blackdown Tableland NP for the next few nights but had forgotten about Labour Day long weekend and it was fully booked until Monday. We decided to stay at Duaringa Rest Area until everyone goes back to work.

Apart from previously mentioned mattress and tonneau cover, the camper is working out well. Still contemplating changes to the canvas area but keeping all things in mind at the moment. As for the trip, so far so good. It's relaxing, scenery's great, I like the small towns and it certainly beats working for a living, which is what I'll be doing when we get to Townsville, if only for a short time.

We will try and upload some photos soon, the cameras have certainly had a workout. Trying to decide which ones to upload is the hard part.

Geoff