It’s been over 2 years now since my last post, but we have once again quit work, hitched up and set off on a new adventure so I thought I might make a post or two.
A lot has happened since my last post (Laos I think). We have had fire, floods, pestilence (in the form of a global pandemic) and war. All sounds a bit biblical really. Aside from that, we have spent the last three years working, and for me, most of the last year has involved travelling to Cairns to work most weeks.
But, life is too short for all that working malarkey, and we made the sensible decision to buy a new caravan and clear off into the sunset. Yep, we got rid of Lucy! If you followed our 2018 trip you will know that Lucy was our little Jayco Swift camper thingie. Not quite a caravan but more than a camper trailer. Lucy probably got more use in the five years we had her that most would get in a lifetime. After travelling some pretty rough roads (I use the term ‘roads’ loosely), including the Plenty Highway, crossing the Tanami desert, the Gibb River Road, and possibly worst of all, the road up to Mitchell Falls in the Kimberly, Lucy took a bit of a hammering. I had to rebuild most of the cabinetry inside, and we could never get rid of all that red dust. But, one of the advantages of Covid was that the value of second hand cars, boats, bikes and caravans went up and so when we sold Lucy we got not much less than what we paid for her.
Now our new van is a proper caravan. A Jayco Journey Outback. And our destination for this trip is the northernmost point of Australia. The tip of Cape York Peninsula at the very top of Queensland. This will include several hundred K’s of dirt roads after the bitumen runs out somewhere north of Cooktown, so I am expecting my cabinet making skills to be called upon at some point. Hopefully ‘Humfrey’, will be as robust on the dirt tracks as Lucy was, but we will soon find out.
We left home two weeks ago, but there is no major rush to get up to North Queensland to start the ‘cape’. The roads need to dry up a bit first and water levels in the creeks need to fall a bit before they can be safely crossed, so we are taking our time heading up the Queensland coast.
Today we are in a place called Mt Morgan, inland a little from Rockhampton which sits on the Tropic of Capricorn. We are actually trying to sit out a few days of forecast rain before heading into Byfield National Park which sits right on the coast. We are already in Croc country so not sure how safe the beaches are there, but I guess we will find out!
Our trip started with a music festival weekend just up the road from home at Canungra. From there, after a true South Indian breakfast at my favourite Hindu temple (yep, in South East Queensland, I love Indian food, see my post ‘the Kerala Express’), we headed to Hervey Bay for a few days, and then on to a little coastal town called Woodgate. This place was a regular summer holiday destination for us when our kids were little, and we actually spent a few Christmases here or times leading up to or just after Christmas. So, going there on this trip was a bit of nostalgia for us, and the last time we were there was about 8 years ago, even though our daughter Kate has rediscovered the place in adulthood and been there a couple of times in the past year.
Along the way we have managed to squeeze in a few bike rides and a couple of good walks. We got up to the top of Mt Larcom that overlooks Gladstone; that was a tough walk; needed a massage after that one, and we found some beautiful rock pools called Utopia pools at Mt Walsh which was a great place to soak in the cool water for a while.
As always we are trying to live on a bit of a budget so that we can travel for longer before needing to go back to work. I’m not sure how we will go with that this time around considering the fact the diesel is around $2.00 a litre and groceries are pretty steep too. More on that in a future post though.
Take The Leap 