Today was a travel day so we were up at a reasonable hour, hitched up, and off to the Bruce Highway.
First challenge for the day was the quite steep incline just leaving Conway Beach towards Proserpine, but the Mighty Mazda BT-50 surged up the hill at a top speed of 35 kmh in second gear and conquered the task without even raising a sweat. To be fair, the speed limit both up and down that hill is 40 kph.
Then it was through Proserpine along the Bruce Highway, which means roadwork. We struck speed limits and single lane sections pretty well all day and most of it was adding more patches to the existing patches on the road. Not much fun at all. Other aspects of today’s drive included a lot more road trains, particularly heading North, including quite a few wide loads with mining trucks on board. We also noticed a lot more cattle in largish herds and a considerable volume of road kill – mainly wallabies or small kangaroos.
Overall although it is quite interesting to see the cane harvesters, driving through cane fields isn’t all that inspiring. There always seem to be mountains in the background and that makes things a bit more interesting, but in general there was nothing overly exciting about today’s drive.
Cane Harvesting outside Mackay
Cane Harvesting outside Mackay
First stop was at Kuttabul, where we had our morning coffee and updated the blog for the last couple of days – internet reception at Conway Beach was poor. Kuttabul has a general store/roadhouse and a mechanic and not much else.
Kuttabul General Store
From Kuttabul it was a short distance to Mackay where we stopped at the visitor information centre for some research material and had lunch. Mackay is a largish town but it wasn’t on our must see list this year so we continued down the highway through Sarina where we had planned stopping at the caravan park.
Outside Mackay Visitor Info Centre & Botanical Gardens
However, at the visitor information centre we had picked up a brochure for the Flaggy Rock Exotic Fruit Garden and Icecreamery. We then found out that there was a free camp at Flaggy Rock, so our final destination for the day became Flaggy Rock – I keep referring to it as Fraggle Rock for some reason. We were unsure of our timing and the respective locations of the free camp and the ice cream shop so went to the free camp and made sure we were set up first. As it turns out there is only one other campervan here, in a huge paddock behind the local community centre. We will visit the ice cream place tomorrow morning!
Ann had a bit of a chat with the ladies in the community centre who were having a local quilting group get-together and they had some beautiful work to show. They are getting ready for a local quilt show on 23rd & 24th August.
It Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This
We enjoyed sitting out in the sun reading our books until it was time for me to cook steaks on the BBQ for dinner.
Shorty's RV Adventures 