July 27 - 29 (Day 178-180) - Cooktown to Laura

Monday 27 July

Today's the day we start making our way up the Cape God willing! We packed up our campsite and headed into town to the post office and supermarket to make sure we have enough supplies for the next week and then also to the library as we had books we needed to return from the Mossman library and also renew one the kids hadn't quite finished reading yet. Much to the kids delights, we were able to spend some time there while Greg did a bit more business work.

We then went down to the foreshore and had lunch before heading back out to Lakeland and started up the Cape.

Jude's lovely flowers for me.

The Intersection! This is where you take a left
turn to start the drive up the Cape!

We filled up at the Lakeland petrol station as the prices on the Cape are going to quite a bit more. Diesel was about $1.28/litre, which was slightly better than in Cooktown, surprisingly.

As you can see from these photos you can see how quickly we have gone from lovely green vegetation to dry slightly red dirt and the temperature has certainly climbed again.

Telstra coverage on Cape York Peninsula -
Not Much!

One of the challenges on the Cape will be the lack of phone signal (and thus internet and the ability to get business work done). As you can see, most of Cape York Peninsula has absolutely no phone signal at all! As mentioned a few entries ago, we're in the middle of a new product launch so it's very important to be able to monitor things like pricing, sales, reviews, customer feedback and so on. There's also a lot to do to ensure we don't run out of stock of our other products.

So we pointed our ship towards Laura where we know there will be some signal to do some more school and business work.

We had looked up a few spots to stop and had investigated them but found them to be too sandy and quite boggy looking so turned around and came back to a campground just opposite to the Roadhouse.

While we were in Cooktown we realised that a pin holding the awning arm to the van had broken. In fact this had broken early in our trip and Greg had replaced it down in Mt Gambier, but it's broken off again. So Greg showed Matt what he needed to do. Hopefully it will keep us going a while longer again!

Having gotten the new power meters, Greg spent a few hours in the evening installing one of them and modifying the wiring on the other one. This is so one of them will more accurately show the current being drawn from the battery, and the new one will be used to see how much current is going IN to the batteries. This is helpful when the batteries are on charge via the solar blanket - if it blows over in the wind or the shadow of a tree passes over it, you can easily see the charging current has dropped and go and attend to the problem.

Tuesday 28 July

A Bit About Laura!

Laura is a very small town! In fact to be honest you wouldn't even call it a town! There used to be a small roadhouse here but that's closed now, so about all there is is the very basic camping area / caravan park.  Directly behind the caravan park is a dead rugby field, which looks again like the remnant of some facilities which were probably used prior to Covid shutting everything down.

There are some Aboriginal settlements nearby, and on our first night the settlement across the other side of the highway was having some kind of party. There was singing and cheering and whistling and so on. Another night they did the same sort of thing but from the opposite direction. They never bothered us, in fact we never even saw them, but at night time you could see the lights from their houses through the trees.

This caravan park / campground has the feel of Hebron campsite! There are a few ATCO huts on site, the area is fairly dry with gum trees around, it's hot during the days but there's a lovely cool breeze in the mornings and evenings. Much like Hebron during School of the Prophets! It's pretty basic in its facilities though, and for $20/night it's OK. It has toilets and hot showers, but they are very basic facilities - a lot of the taps drip and the toilet cisterns keep running. One would think it would only cost a few dollars to replace all the tap washers and a bit more on the toilet cisterns so as to not waste all that water.

It's quite a nice spot to use as a base for a few days, especially as it has good phone signal!

Over the course of our travels Bek's interest in animals, particularly dogs has developed quite a lot. Where we are staying at the moment they have two red cattle dogs. One of them is the mum and one of her sons. The mum is quite friendly so will come up and sniff and let you pat her while the younger boy will bark and make you feel a bit scared but he's quite a scaredy cat himself. So he'll come closer wagging his tale but then back off. Bek has gradually got him to come closer and closer without barking and is now able to pat him without him having any hesitation. The owners said its because they haven't seen people for a while since the Cape was shut down and not many people coming through at the moment.



We've had a quiet day today catching up on school work and business work. It's been beautiful weather. Quite warm at times during the day but has cooled off nicely each evening. Greg spent some time with Judah teaching him the basics of electronics (Ohm's Law), as he was trying to explain a few things to him the night before about what was going on with the power meters and whatnot.

The owner warned us that if we came out at night to be aware of a horse that sometimes escapes out of it's property and comes and eats their lawn at night. We haven't heard it other nights but definately heard it last night while we were getting some work done. We took the torch out and there it was only a few metres away from our van. I think the own is quite worried about it coming over to her property now as it kicked one of her dogs and it died the day before we got here so she's little fearful it could really do some damage to someone if they accidentally spooked it got kicked also.

Wednesday 29 July

Another quiet day getting school and business work done. The lady owner at the campground feeds the Kookaburra's every evening so there is plenty of birdlife here.

We are intending to move on tomorrow and head up towards Coen for a couple of days perhaps. Hopefully by that time we should have enough work done to be able to leave it for several days while we head up to the Tip!

-- Mim and Greg