June 29 (Day 150) - Townsville part 3

Monday 29 June

On this lovely morning we enjoyed pancakes altogether and then Greg and Jonathan changed the transfer case fluid in the car while the kids climbed trees, read books, played board games and rode around on bikes and made up other games together.  I enjoyed lots of cuddles with Chloe while chatting to Maxanne.

Later in the day Greg went with Jonathan and Joshua to a rental place they help to manage to help install a new kitchen

 

Pajero

The morning transfer case fluid change was a pretty easy job - just unscrew the drain plug, let the old stuff run out, and then refill with a hand pump.

Even though the old fluid looked pretty good when it came out, it was still considerably darker than the new stuff, so it was worth changing.

Transfer case fluid. New on left, old on right.

After they came back from doing the kitchen, they changed the fluid in the front and rear differentials. Greg had checked this before we left Adelaide and they still looked OK, but again once it was drained out you could see the difference! 

Differential fluid. New (bottom left), front diff (top centre), rear diff (bottom right)

 It looked like the rear diff fluid had been changed, possibly at the 180,000km service when it was due, but they may have not bothered with the front diff. Anyway they're all clean now.

They then went onto the fuel filter, which was pretty grotty as well!

Eww! Lots of sediment floating in the fuel filter. And the ends of the filter element
(through the holes) is supposed to be white!

All the contaminants on the fuel tank side of the filter. Lucky there IS a fuel filter!

They went very late, not finishing until after 12 as they had a good old chat afterwards!

-- Mim

June 26 - 28 (Day 147-149) Townsville to Rollingstone, and back to Townsville!

Friday 26 June

Thursday packing up had taken a long time so we decided to give ourselves a bit more time and head off Friday once we had finished. It would also give Greg some time to go out and get the other laptop and set it up while we weren't travelling.

Finally after packing up we had some lunch and then headed off to fill up with fuel and then to find a spot to camp. Wikicamps has been so useful with all sorts of information about locations and what facilities they might have and possible costs if any.

June 23-25 (Day 144-146) - Townsville part 2

Tuesday 23 June

Mt Stuart

With the car and caravan all sorted out, we decided to do some more sight seeing today as we'd had several days around the house. We had breakfast & made plans to head up Mount Stuart, which is one of two large mountains in the greater Townsville area. We talked about Castle Hill in our last blog entry which is close to the ocean; Mt Stuart is inland somewhat, sitting about 7km south of central Townsville, and is a prominent feature of the skyline.

What are our travel plans at the moment?

Hi all,

PHEW!

That's the sound I made when I finally got the blog up to date! It has been a bit of a grind, especially the videos, so I hope they've been interesting enough.

Anyway now that's out the way I wanted to give you a quick update on our travel plans. You're probably aware Queensland's borders are still closed at the moment. This actually suits us fairly well, because it means there aren't any southerners filling up campgrounds and escaping the cold winter. Sorry fellow SA'ers, we do feel sympathetic for those who would want to be up here, but at least for us it's working OK.

The Big Picture

On a broad scale, we are still hoping to complete the full lap this year, but a month or so ago we roughly sketched out a couple of contingency plans if we were unable to get into either WA or NT. Loosely, these would be to either:

June 19-22 (Day 140-143) - Townsville part 1

Friday June 19

Caravan Brakes

Our front left van wheel with its shiny
new magnet just installed (just in front of
where the man is working)!

First job off the rank was to get the caravan brakes fixed up, so I rose early Friday morning to take the van up to Bartel Trailers. I stayed with the technician while he did the work and learned a lot from what he had to say. This also gave me a chance to see how he did what he did just on the off-chance I have to get in there and fix something in the Outback sometime!

June 18 (Day 139) - Home Hill to Townsville

After breakfast we headed out of Home Hill.

Just on the northern outskirts of Home Hill, just before the Burdekin Bridge, we saw a rock museum on the left, so thought it might be worth a look.

It was reasonably interesting, although very old in its layout. It had been started by the father of the man who owns it now, who himself would be in his 70's, and the general decor, raw timber cabinetry and mismatched shelving units gave an appearance of a private collection started in the 1950's, run on a shoestring budget, and which had bit by bit grown over the years and probably outgrown any plans the original owner may have had! I imagine it's the type of private collection of artifacts collectors may have held in Victorian times on their personal field of interest, which people may have been willing to pay a small sum to view.

June 16-17 (Day 137-138) - Home Hill and Ayr

June 16

Home Hill is a quiet little town with a train line running through it. The showground is set back a block from the highway, but the train line runs right along side the showgrounds. This is preferable to being close to the highway, however, as there are only several rail services per day and during the trains they tend not to sound their horns!

The train line is primarily a freight line, but it seems to run a daily passenger service too. It seems a lot of these cane growing areas have a 'local' mill, as in every 100km or so, where the sugar cane is crushed and turned into cane sugar juice. Once crushed, this juice is loaded into stainless steel tanks on carriages and is then freighted by train down the coast to be refined into molasses, golden syrup, and all the other steps until you end up at plain white sugar. It is presumably cheaper to do this than carting the whole sugar cane down to a larger mill for processing, and then refining of the syrup.

June 15 (Day 136) - Proserpine to Home Hill

While packing up to leave, our neighbours mentioned they were going to a camp ground near a town called Home Hill. It was a free camp, which unfortunately wasn't going to work for us because we no longer had 240V to recharge the laptop; which meant no work for me! I'd charged both the laptop and the Surface up in the park picnic area last night but this would only last a couple of hours, and we weren't due in Townsville until Thursday (currently it was only Monday). But we thought we might make it through one night at a free camp.

June 13-14 (Day 134-135) - Proserpine

June 13

Early next morning the kids cooked pancakes while I got ready to announce the winners of the Instagram competition. Phone signal wasn't great but we figured we didn't have time to drive back into Proserpine itself as well as all the work needed to do the live draw.

So, I wasn't going to go into the details here, as up to now I've kept the business side of things out of this blog. But the drawing of this competition pretty well dominated the morning, so I'll lift the lid a little on what happened. I'm not "wanting" you to watch this, let me be clear, because this isn't really my 'thing', but if this blog to be a fairly thorough account of what we've done then I guess I need to include it.

June 12 (Day 133) - Mackay to Proserpine

I rose early to take the car down to Pedders to get the work done, which they were able to do pretty promptly. Most of it was just tightening up some fasteners but they found the front shock absorbers were leaking, probably as a result of our Fraser Island experience, so I booked that in up in Townsville.

With that done, we packed up and went for a bit of a scenic drive around Mackay, as so far we'd not seen a lot of the town itself.  First up we visited an op shop to buy some more books for the kids, as Bek had found a series of horse books there in a brief visit a couple of days ago. We then went to a bakery to get some lunch, and dropped into a local butchers where we got, among other things, crocodile steaks and camel sausages! Having since consumed them, I can attest that the flavour of crocodile is a pretty balanced mix of chicken and fish, while the camel was a bit hard to taste exactly as the sausages were fairly well spiced.

June 9-11 (Day 130-132) - Mackay

After a fairly slow morning we headed out from Finch Hatton Showgrounds and back to Mackay. This time we were going to a caravan park. We'd been getting a few clunks from the front end of the Pajero so I had it booked in at Pedders to get a check-over, so we needed to be based somewhere central. Plus, this caravan park had a pool which is always a favourite with the kids!

June 7-8 (Day 128-129) - Ilbilbie to Finch Hatton via Mackay

Sunday 7th June

 

It was a wet and miserable night last night so we packed up after breakfast and headed straight off from Riverside Bush Camping, deciding to hold our meeting in the evening.

Our first stop along the way was Sarina. While Mim did the week's shopping, I filled up the caravan's water tanks and collected several forests' worth of brochures at the Information Centre from an enthusiastic staff member on duty that morning! Once again, however, the value of information centres came through, in that amidst the many options available to do in a given town, a knowledgeable information centre staffer can give you a few specific and timely recommendations about things which our family would enjoy doing. She directed us out to Finch Hatton, where the local showgrounds offers powered camping sites for $25/night. She also said while we were in the area that we must make sure we visited Finch Hatton Gorge, Eungella National Park (pronounced 'Young-gell-lah' g as in golf) and Broken River, where platypus are often seen.

June 5-6 (Day 126-127) - Benaraby to Milman (north of Rockhampton) to Ilbilbie

Given we've finally gotten back onto the road after a month or so of not going far, we wanted to keep moving for a bit, so both these days were mainly driving up the coast. On our 2017 road trip we made it as far as Rockhampton before turning inland, so we wanted to get into new territory as soon as possible.

June 5

We had a pretty quiet day today. We packed up and drove into Rockhampton for a quick refuel then drove on to a free camp on the banks of the Fitzroy River. Got there about 4pm. It was a bit of a drive down to the river bank but we're getting adept at this now so it wasn't too hard, and meant we had a lovely spot to camp for the night! There's a video a bit further down.

The bridge in the background of the next photo is evidently the old road, which is still in quite good condition, but stops abruptly near the highway. However this provides good quality access into this little nook down by the Fitzroy River.

4WD'ing

This is a 4WD-only track, and was one of many times I was glad we had a 4WD on this trip. We saw plenty of great spots on our last two road trips just with our VY Commodore wagon and our road van. The Commodore's engine bay was designed for a V8 so with its V6 there's plenty of room, unlike under the Pajero's hood where everything is very tight. I am not at all into 4WD'ing for the sake of getting your vehicle covered in mud, scratched to death and into the most ridiculous spots that a mountain climber would hardly go. However despite having a soft spot for our Commodore, and the ease of working on it I'm really appreciating the Pajero's ability to get us to secluded spaces like this which would simply be off the agenda without a 4WD, and without which we'd have to camp in more accessible, but also more populous camp spots.

June 3 - 4 (Day 124-125) - Bundaberg to Benaraby

Wednesday 3 June - Bundaberg to Benaraby (Boyne River)

We enjoyed a fairly slow morning at our free camp as we needed to pass some time for the Bundaberg Barrel to open at 10am. We packed up our things and headed off and the first stop was a Bunnings for a few things. We needed a 15amp power cord so we could connect the output of the inverter to the van's official power inlet point so we could use all powerpoints from the inverter (when needed).

We then made it to the Bundaberg Barrel only to find that it was still shut and we had read the sign wrong. :( It had said that you could buy drinks online and pickup from 10am - 2pm or something like that. Anyway we hung around and discussed what we would do next and in that time a lady had come to the door and asked us if we were OK. We told her what we had thought and our reason for being there (which was also to buy some of their drinks), so she sold us a slab of soft drink bottles and we were on our way!

June 1-2 (Day 122-123) - Woodgate to Bundaberg

Today was our last day at Woodgate, so Matt and I went for a morning run along the foreshore while the others went for a beach walk.

Sprinting the last 100m!

Us boys finished off with a morning swim - the water was very calm, and while it was a cool morning the water was quite pleasant.

We got back, had breakfast and did our reading. We've been going through Joshua recently in the morning. The last few days have been looking at what is initially a fairly drab looking list of towns given to various tribes. While there are indeed plenty of names, a chapter breakup is a very helpful start in understanding it all a bit more, as it provides some structure around them all, so you can at least see which sections apply to who.