It seems that regardless of the time we go to bed, we still get up at our usual time. This morning it was a DIY breakfast courtesy of the motel. The night before, you choose your breakfast items e.g. cereal, juice, bread, jam etc. and they deliver it to your room later that evening. In the morning prepare breakfast using the toaster, microwave etc. and off you go. After breakfast we took a short walk to find a geocache and get some exercise. Not only did we find the geocache, we saw a whale and a family of dingos.
The photos above were taken outside the cultural centre close to where the geo-cache was. Alas that is probably the closest we will get to seeing any whales this trip.
Today’s journey was just positioning trip with nothing specific to view en-route. Initially we cut a corner and avoided the main highway (appropriately called the Bruce Highway) for a number of miles. This led us through an area of sugar cane farms and homesteads that were very different to the areas we had seen so far. We eventually joined the Bruce Highway and continued on it for the remainder of our 380km trip.
We stopped at Childers for coffee, and being a week end we were entitled to a fresh cream pastry to go with it! (if you have read the NZ blog, you may see the start of a pattern which very quickly turned into the legalising of cream cakes every day!). After coffee I headed off to find a local geo-cache while Lyn gave one of the local dollar stores a visit. I quickly found the cache and went back to join Lyn in the store. I noticed some leather belts on sale for around $3.50 Cdn, we had been looking for a cheap source of belts to strap a wicker picnic hamper on the rear luggage rack of the MGB, these would be perfect. Talking of old British cars:
We saw this old Austin on the street, reminds me little of an A35 at the front.
As we continued along the Bruce we would see clouds of smoke hanging over the country side, we were not sure if they were from controlled burns or wild fires. There were certainly signs of previous fires in the trees along the side of the road. In Canada we have Fire Risk signs along the road ranging from No Risk to Extreme Risk, here the have an additional category beyond Extreme, it is Catastrophic!
Next stop was Miriam Vale for lunch, then further north along the Bruce into mountain views.
We reached our destination for the next two nights, Rockhampton, at around 1530. Although it wasn’t an overly long journey relative to our winter trips where we’ll do up to 1000 kms in a day, I still felt a little whacked at the end. This could be due to old age, driving in the Southern Hemisphere, driving on the left side of the road or all three. In fact I can add a 4th excuse for the last 10 kms. As we came into Rockhampton we crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn and were officially in the Tropics! I think that is another first for us.
Tomorrow will be visits to some caves and a heritage village.