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.

The drive up Castle Hill took about 15 minutes as it was quite steep and windy, but we got some lovely views from the top!

 Once we'd seen the view & taken a few photos we then thought we would head up to Hervey Range & visit the old tearooms but Mim rang ahead to make sure they were open & sadly they weren't so we made our way to Pioneer riverway park & had a lovely swim in the free Riverside pools. We had been here on Sunday briefly but hadn't been able to swim. We had the pool all to ourselves for most of the time we were there, probably mostly because it's not school holidays. It seemed a bit of a waste of the lifeguards' time supervising the pool for no-one but I guess they've got to be there as the pool is open to the public free of charge.

Turtles again!

Spot the swimmer!

 We then found a park nearby & enjoyed a ham or corned beef sandwich.

Mim takes over the narrative here!

When we got home I looked up another op shop that we hadn't been to & it was still open for another hour. Greg needed to use the car so Uncle Colin drove Aunty Shirley Bek & I down to the op shop. I've been trying to find another casual black skirt to wear as my other one got ripped & was repaired once but was now irreparable.
I had success & so did Bek at finding some bargains. :)

Wednesday 24 June

Where the power cord hides

This was another quiet home day. I went for a run in the morning, and then got on with a caravan job that'd been hanging around for a few months. Having gotten the inverter back in, I wanted to be able to set it up so when we were free camping we could safely run all the caravan's power points from the inverter, rather than just have a single power outlet available as we did at the moment. To do this I connected a cord which was housed in a weatherproof box underneath the caravan, and connect it to the normal power inlet socket which you'd normally plug the van into in a caravan park.

The van plugged into its new umbilical cord!

Thursday 25 June

Diligent Matt got on with some school work this morning, again. The kids are pretty good at getting their work done, sometimes they need a bit of a poke but they do sometimes get on with it themselves. Which is nice.

As today was likely to be our last full day in Townsville, we had lunch with Uncle Colin and Aunty Shirley, which was lovely. They made a couple of big meat pies and we all had a very good feed! It was nice to chat, particularly for Mim who knew them both in Perth prior to our marriage.

Uncle Colin and Aunty Shirley

After lunch I went shopping for a replacement laptop computer while Mim and the kids went down to the park.

Later in the afternoon, Uncle Colin and Aunty Shirley's daughter Kimberley arrived with her husband, for an afternoon visit. This was nice again for Mim, who'd been friends with Kimberley in Perth.

Throughout the rest of the day we continued the seemingly interminable task of packing everything up again! Even though we'd only been there a week it was surprising how many things had come inside which had to be repacked in their rightful places.

-- Greg