I imagine a lot of people all around the world will be heaving a huge sigh of relief when the clock ticks over to 2021. We’ve had the trifecta – fire, flood, and plague, with a side salad of political and social unrest, especially in Europe and the USA. Moses would have been proud. Here…
On our last day at Palm Cove we thought we’d head inland along the Savannah Way. We’d been out there a few years before, as part of a tour we did up to Cairns and then over to the Gulf of Carpentaria and we’d passed through some interesting little towns. The first bit of excitement…
If you’re following the trip and feel you’ve missed anything, this page has the whole journey in the right order. Sometimes, instead of driving everywhere, it’s nice to go on an organised tour where it’s all done for you. With that in mind, we went through the brochures for tours up to Mossman Gorge and…
Pete and I packed our bags, checked out, and headed for our next hotel at Palm Cove, which is really just a northern suburb of Cairns. Pete had stayed at the Grand Chancellor when he was still one of the gainfully employed, to attend a conference. Back then the hotel was surrounded by golf courses,…
That east wind kept on blowing and we decided a trip to the reef was going to be too uncomfortable. Instead, we opted for a visit to Cairns’ world class aquarium, where we could visit the reef without getting wet. The aquarium didn’t open until 10am so we spent a couple of hours wandering around…
Pete and I and our friends drove 60km south of Cairns to the little town of Babinda. It’s right on the Bruce Highway and I remembered noticing the sign that said ‘this way to the boulders’ or words to that effect as we’d passed through. We turned west from the highway and drove through a…
We left Cardwell early, there being no point in looking for breakfast there. It wasn’t far to Tully, a much bigger place than Cardwell. Maybe we’d be lucky there. The cane harvest was in full swing in Queensland. We had already passed a number of mills belching thick columns of steam into the atmosphere. Out…
From Townsville we hit the road fairly early. The place where we’d had breakfast the last time we were here was closed in a very final sort of way and nobody else seemed to be open, so we headed along the Bruce looking for a roadhouse on our way. We eventually settled for Hungry Jacks…
You could be forgiven for thinking this is a nice picture of a country road with views of the mountains (such as they are in Australia) but you’d be wrong. This is the Bruce Highway, Queensland’s most important road. Part of the A1 which goes right around Australia, it runs from Brisbane in the south…
By this time of year, Pete and I would have been somewhere else for a few weeks – overseas, interstate, or even seriously intrastate. We’d planned to be OS in April and on a Christmas cruise in December, but covid put paid to those plans. Still, it seemed a bit remiss in this, my seventieth…