June 30 - July 1 (Day 151 - 152) - Abergowrie State Forest / Damper Creek

Tuesday 30 June

We headed off about 11am and headed into Townsville itself to buy a few bits and pieces for the caravan and the car, then refuel the car (and ourselves!) and headed out of town.

Given we didn't get on our way proper until after 1pm, we wanted to try to crack on and get a good distance covered. So we drove fairly solidly for a couple of hours, and took a rest at Hinchinbrook Lookout, which looked north east across to Hinchinbrook Island

This was another David Attenborough moment as the view was pretty special. Probably still not as good as at Eungella Sky Window, but still pretty good!

The view from Hinchinbrook Lookout

We also saw a couple of enormous spiders here! I guess in the photo it's hard to get an idea of the scale, but it would have been about the size of the palm of my hand! We were later told it was a Golden Orb spider.

The view from Hinchinbrook Lookout made us want to drive down there and camp in a hidden secluded nook, although we knew it would be full of mozzies. So we moved on and intended to stop in a free camp near Cardwell. But as the afternoon wore on we were getting a bit sick of driving (I guess we must be getting soft!), and here and there we saw little tracks disappearing into the forest on either side of the road. They just had the right smell about them, if you know what I mean. Not smell as in a literal smell, but the sort of look as though you think it might be a good place to camp. Well we took one of these little tracks, which was fairly narrow but passable, and after a brief inspection found it led to an ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS little camp spot right by a nicely flowing creek!

What could be better!? While we had trees all around us, the area we were camped in was clear and basically flat, and even had a campfire there where others had obviously camped (and left some rubbish unfortunately). It was fairly close to the road so you could still hear traffic, but there is no way in the world anyone would have known we were there.

Firstly we set up camp, and decided to shoot this little video showing how we do it!

Once we were set up, the creek was the first thing to try out, and it was lovely and cool, but not too cold. It was only waist deep or so in the little pool here, and on either side it would only be calf deep probably, so swimming was restricted mainly to the pool, but it was still very nice!

We then got the campfire going and showed the kids how to make billy tea, which was delicious!

We had tea around the fire but just after that it started to sprinkle with rain a bit so we went inside to have tea and do our reading, but got some damper going which we enjoyed for supper.

Wednesday 1 July

Today was a very quiet day because it had rained most of the night and rained all day! :( Pretty miserable actually, but we had plenty of battery power, water and cups of tea! :)

I started reading "90 Minutes at Entebbe" to the kids last night and read some more during today. I read this many years ago and loved it, and had been scouring second-hand book shops for it while we were on our travels, and then just happened to spy it in Jonathan and Maxanne's bookcase while we were with them in Townsville! They were kind enough to let us borrow it! It is a very exciting account of how terrorists hijacked a passenger jet with many Israelis on board and flew it down to Uganda, and how the Israeli air force managed to slip in, save the hostages and whisk them all (bar one I believe) back to Israel without the terrorists finding out! We're only up to chapter 3 but enjoying it immensely!

Judah then had the opportunity to make some butter! He'd found a recipe in his science book on how to do it, and being a real experimenter and budding scientist he has to try all these things out. Mim had bought some cream for the job so this was a great time to try it out.

The rest of the day was pretty quiet.

-- Greg