Going East.3

Going East.3

Posted on 10 Jan, 2009 4 comments

2nd July we left at 8.30 am. It was 11C, brrr., but soon warmed up again. The road still very bad, potholes, narrow and lots of dead kangaroo’s on and along the road, you really have to watch where you’re going. The landscape was as flat as before, here and there a sudden ridge going over miles of width. A bit like flat Holland with dikes. Every time you’d reach the top of the ridge, you’d see more flat land! We were heading for Hughenden, boring, bad roads, etc. We stopped for some coffee and found a grassy edged street in a village where the dogs could be let out. Paul chatted to a grey nomad, who was having a cup of coffee with his wife beside his caravan.
We have seen hundreds of caravans on the road, as up North where we are is the dry holiday season, and many older people travel up North to escape the winter down South. Some had also dogs with them. So yes, Australians are definitely a nomadic people.

Slowly we were reaching the Great Dividing Range, green hills and bendy roads, a bit of a change after all that flat pancake country. I could even call it scenic driving, especially since the roads looked more country roads than Highways. Unfortunately I was driving so not many pictures were taken here, but I have the odd one anyway. We were now slowly moving North-east instead, heading for a place called Charters Towers. This is a very nice old historical town with interesting buildings, quite large too and of course our mobiles worked again. Here I received a message from Laurette which I answered with a phonecall. Loud and clear was the communication, nice to hear her since Thursday night. A quick look on the thermometer let us know it was 25C outside, great. The road signs in C.T. were inadequate, just like in Mt. Isa, and sometimes we just had to follow our instinct and the compass to get the right direction, LOL. But we never took the wrong road. Again fabulous weather was our companion, blue skies and mountains and…good roads for a change. We finally could move on through green country, where they obviously had a lot of rain of lately.
So now we were driving in NE direction towards Townsville. Townsville is on the coast. You bypass the town anyway.
From Townsville on we headed North, back to the tropics. After Townsville slowly moving towards Ingham, and we could see we would never make Cairns that day. We planned not to overdo it and not drive in the dark anymore. So we decided to change plans and find a place to stay by 5 pm. There was much more traffic and driving became tiresome. ” I’ll ring them in Ingham”, I said, and started laughing. Haha, try saying that quickly and omit the th and you’ll be rhyming. So, in Ingham we rang a caravanpark in Cardwell, hoping they could accommodate us at short notice. We were lucky! I also rang the people in Cairns where we would be staying so they knew not to expect us. We did some shopping, beer, milk, bread etc. and drove on.

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