Hervey Bay

Monday, 9th September

Very different to the Marlborough we visited recently in England

No excitement this morning, we had a very boring departure – thank goodness!

Today we left the tropics behind, which means that the days are definitely getting longer – but the nights are definitely getting colder.  Once the sun comes up, the air quickly warms up and today the temperature sat on about 26-27 degrees all day.  We did have a couple of small showers, though.

We had a long drive today from Rockhampton to Hervey Bay.  The 400 kms took us seven hours, which included a couple of rest stops and lunch.  There was a lot more traffic today and plenty of road works to break the boredom.  Fortunately, we weren’t held up for any length of time.  Up until today, the Bruce Highway was been very good to drive on, however, from Miriam Vale to Hervey Bay left a lot to be desired – the surface was very rough and we bounced about a fair bit.  The bottle of soap even bounced out of the hand basin onto the floor!  The scenery today included scrubby trees, mango trees, sugar cane, looooong coal trains, pineapples, lots of trucks and some very slow caravans!  Some small hills helped relieve the monotony.

We are staying for two nights at the Fraser Lodge Caravan Park in Hervey Bay.  This is a very nice park, with tropical vegetation around the grassy sites.  We did disturb a couple of blades of grass when we reversed onto site and one of the park workers came past as Les was pushing them back into place.  “Don’t worry mate, it’ll grow back.”  I can imagine what Dennis at Sarina would have said!  After setting up, we went for a quick Cooks’ Tour of the area and drove right along the Esplanade, which goes for about 10 kms.  We also discovered there is no shortage of caravan parks at Hervey Bay, which does seem a very nice place to spend a few days.  We have decided to give the whale watching (which involves a long time on a boat going up and down) a miss and have a day on Fraser Island instead.