The girls!

Dad and Andy on the beers

It was that evening that dad enjoyed his first (and second and third) ‘cowboy’ shooter – a divine mixture of butterscotch schnapps and baileys! We had many more of those throughout the holiday!

Kate will do anything for $5!!

After a lovely meal and cocktails in Hog’s Breath steak restaurant, we headed out to the bars and drank until the early hours.

Dad and Mum

It was about an hour’s drive to Airlie Beach and there were plenty of zzzz’s being let out on the way there after all the walking! We stayed at Club Crocodile as we usually do and got ready for a night out in party central.

There's a storm a-brewin'

As we were about to leave a storm was closing in and the colours of the sea and the sky were wonderful.

4 pixies

We managed to walk across to Wedge Island and had a rest there before heading back across the beach to try and spot a wallaby.
It was one of those days, as we failed to see a wallaby at the beach as well. Just shows that nature is not predictable, you can’t just turn up and expect them to appear as if they were at a zoo I suppose!

View over to Wedge Island from the headland

The adrenalin started pumping as we set off along the familiar rocky paths of the ‘Andrew’s Point’ walking track. There are more than 136 species of birds, 25 species of butterflies, 22 species of mammals, 8 species of amphibians and… 25 species of reptiles including the carpet python, coastal taipan, carpet snake, common keelback snake, yellow faced whip snake and the common tree snake.
We all walked in single file staring into the grass and rocks, waiting for a rustle of noise. It started off promisingly, with a huge lizard racing away from us into a hollow tree trunk. After that we headed up towards the top of the cliff where our previous sightings took place. After a while we were actually willing a snake to show its face, just so that everyone could see one. However, we have learnt that although they are everywhere, it is actually quite rare to see them as they quickly slither off if they hear noise. Despite 5 pairs of eyes scouring the vegetation for anything, all we saw were lizards and skinks (tiny lizard-like creatures) everywhere. I’m sure there were lots more pairs of eyes watching us than we knew about though!

On the boardwalk

We went on the ‘Diversity Boardwalk’ track first as we needed the tide to be going out in order to do the main walk and cross over to Wedge Island at low tide. It is an award-winning walk, and you could see why, there were lots of information boards informing about the aboriginal history and the wildlife encountered along the way.

Mum bottle-feeding baby kangaroo

I wouldn’t normally mention my trips to the ‘ladies’, however on this occasion it was a notable experience because as I made my way round the back of the café to the toilets, there sat a woman and a little girl bottle-feeding a baby grey kangaroo!! It was so adorable, it turns out that the lady runs a kangaroo orphanage and rears the babies until they can cope on their own in the wild. The babies are usually those that are rescued from a mother’s pouch after she has died (normally on the road). Mum and I got to feed it as well and then we watched as it hopped off with its friend the little girl! They even have a sack hung from the wall (resembling a pouch) for it to hop into on an evening to sleep!

A lizard of some kind, surprising what a difference those legs make about how calm you feel!

DAY 10: February 27th, Cape Hillsborough – Airlie Beach

After our previous trip to Cape Hillsborough last year, Andy and I were determined to go back with my family. Firstly, to overcome our fear of walking there after the horror snake-fest last time and secondly to give them an Australian bush-walking initiation trip.
Snakes and spiders aside, Cape Hillsborough is a beautiful place, a complete mixture of things including a lovely beach, rainforest surrounding the beach, rocky sections with pools, a boardwalk over mangrove wetlands and then the cliff tops with their walking trails. Huge grassed areas for barbeques and picnics and a small camping area make it popular with families, walkers, nature lovers and people fishing on the beach as the tide goes out. Although there is evidence of aboriginal occupation, the first recorded European to see Cape Hillsborough was Captain Cook, who on June 2nd 1770, named the headland after the Earl of Hillsborough.

Me and sis

There is allegedly a jazz afternoon at the Mackay Marina on a Sunday afternoon which I had always wanted to go to. We checked into our hotel at the marina, with beautiful rooms overlooking the sea, and then had wine and tapas on the edge of the marina. The food was superb, we all ordered something we liked and then shared it all.
Unfortunately, the jazz appeared to have been replaced on this instance by a duo of women in swimming costumes and hats doing acrobatic stunts – not quite the same appeal, but it was lovely to sit there in the sun watching the world go by.
After a stroll along the marina we went to the hotel swimming pool for an hour or so and then retired to our rooms to get ready for our evening meal. We ate at the hotel and had a lovely meal – I had kangaroo steak (which is actually very nice, like a really tender beef steak)!!

Andy missed out on the meal as he was travelling back from his football tournament in Ayr. His team, the Mackay Wanderers, got beaten in the final on penalties so he was disappointed about that, but he got man of the tournament for their team which came with a $50 note, so that eased the pain slightly!

Kate with her Guava Vodka Cruiser

DAY 9: February 26th, Mackay

Today we were setting off from Moranbah to travel for a week, so we packed our suitcases and Ben into the car and headed off to our first stop - Mackay. Poor Ben had a little corner of the boot surrounded by bags and cases! Luckily, we stopped at Nebo, the halfway point, for a break and to check on Ben. To our horror, he was nowhere to be seen as I lifted the boot up and told him to wait… the poor thing could do nothing but wait, he was completely covered in cases! Thankfully, they had got caught on the edge leaving him a little hole to hide in! We re-arranged the baggage and got Ben back in the boot who appeared to be completely unperturbed by the whole thing!
This was to be the last time mum, dad and Kate saw Ben, at least until they come over to Australia again. We went for a last walk together on Harbour Beach and then dropped him in kennels, which was very emotional – even for me and I was going to see him again in 10 days!!

Moranbah Cattleman's Cup Race Day

DAY 8: February 25th, Moranbah Races

Moranbah race course only has two race days a year. One in November that is organised by Andy’s employer Moranbah North Coal – a very posh affair with seafood buffet and free champagne, and the second in February organised by BMA Coal (the other main mining owner here). It was very lucky therefore that it dropped on that mum, dad and Kate were here for the BMA race day, so I had told them to bring their racing attire with them.
Andy took his last shift off work today to go to a football tournament up in Ayr for the weekend with his team from Mackay, so he was absent from the race day crowds – the bookies will have made a noticeable loss.
We all got dressed up and prepared for a hot, dusty, drunken day watching the donkey, er horse racing. We had packed an esky with wine, alcopops and cider as we were told that you were allowed to bring in anything but beer – which the bar was serving. However, a pig-faced jobsworth security guard wouldn’t allow me any cider in because he couldn’t understand that it was different to beer (they are not big on cider over here). Alcopops also were banned, so we ended up with our two bottles of wine. Downer number two was the fact that the first race had been advertised in some places as being an hour and a half earlier than it actually was. So for possibly the first time in our family history, we were actually early!
For those who missed my write-up on the November race day, Moranbah races consists of a total of 6 horses of questionable abilty and a distinct lack of any kind of form, swapping names (opinion of author, not fact) and rotating ex-rugby-players-turned-jockeys and race colours for each of the five races which are run on a sand pit bordered by white brittle ‘grass’ and watched by a complete range of people ranging from those dressed up to the nines(*) to those still in work overalls or shorts and thongs. This may sound very cynical of me, but it is all meant extremely affectionately! It is a great day out – and a day is what you make of it after all!
This race day was nowhere near as posh nor as busy as the November one, but there was still a good turn out, and about 6 bookies vying for our money as the odds fluctuated wildy. It was however very hot and very windy which is not the best combination when you are in the middle of a field that hasn’t seen rain for about 5 months. Ironically, Dusty Daniel won the last race and claimed a hefty $5200 for his efforts!
We were going to stay for the disco at the race course that evening, until one of my colleagues told us that the DJ was his mate and he would be mostly playing alternative house music. Everyone was itching to see our local pub The Black Nugget, and although I had warned them that this was not the most glamorous of drinking hostelries, we went for a drink there that evening. Needless to say, it wasn’t too long before we returned home!

*)This phrase dates from the 18th century, first reported in 1787 in the form 'Twad please me to the nine.' The dressed is a later addition, so the nine does not necessarily refer exclusively to clothing. The phrase is also often seen as up to the nines.
One explanation is that nine, in some numerological systems, connotes perfection. So that dressed to the nines means that you have achieved sartorial perfection.Another explanation which relates more to clothing is that this saying refers to the amount of fabric required to make a quality suit - nine yards. This may seem like a lot of fabric, but enables the tailor to cut all the pieces in the same direction.

DAY 7: February 24th, Moranbah

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested…
Genesis, 2:2

I declared this day a day of rest, and thus the family did go forth to Moranbah swimming pool and swam in the waters there in the open air.

Kate's found a big one...

It was quite late in the afternoon by the time we eventually found somewhere to fossick, but luckily we would be able to take the last tour of the day in the underground sapphire mine. First of all though we had half an hour to find lots of sapphires and make our millions…
We chose a bucket of dirt that had been dug up (we think that they may have a quick look for any huge sapphires first, although they say that they don’t!) and the lady in charge taught us how to fossick. She gave us little plastic bags and told us to put anything we thought might be a sapphire into it and at the end she would sort through and tell us if we had found anything worthwhile. It really isn’t as easy as you might think, firstly you have to sieve all the excess dust and dirt from the fossicking pan, then you have to wash it for a minute in a bath of water so that you are left with bits of wet stone and rock and maybe sapphires. After washing in a particular way then all the sapphires should move to the centre which she illustrated very well, but we failed miserably to replicate! It is then a simple (?!) task to pick out the little lumps of sapphire which look more or less identical to the little lumps of coloured worthless stone! The trick is to look for anything that glistens in the sunlight, and before long we did find some green sapphires! At the end I was getting an eye for it and picked out about three shiny stones that turned out to be zircons. We had filled our little bags with all sorts of lumps of stone, desperately willing them to be sapphires! Mum was too embarrassed to show the lady the huge lump she had picked out thinking it may be more than a bit of rock!
It turned out that Kate and I found four sapphires and 3 zircons, however only one of them (which we have to admit, was the one the lady found when she was demonstrating how to do it!) was of a good enough quality to cut. The others were too flawed to do anything with. Mum and dad did well, finding about five, with two of a good quality.
The underground tour was interesting, showing how the miners had followed the small sapphire seam in a maze of tunnels. Some of the earlier tunnels were so small that the men used to crawl in on their stomachs.
Clutching our well-deserved gems, we retuned home (via an alternative route!) after a long, but action-packed day.
We ate out that evening at the only decent restaurant/café in Moranbah, The Purple Grape.

Washing and sorting through the stones

Some information on the gemfields, and a brief rundown on what a sapphire is, all gratefully sourced from www.fossicking.com.au:

The central Queensland gemfields centred on the small town of Anakie are known worldwide for their sapphire deposits. The gemfields comprise of the about 10 towns including the ones obviously named after the discovery such as Sapphire, Rubyvale and Emerald.

Little of the early history of the Anakie sapphire fields has been accurately recorded. The first discovery of sapphire near Retreat Creek was in the early 1870s but the first commercial production did not occur until the early 1880s. By 1903 sapphire mining, centred on two camps (now Rubyvale and Sapphire), was an established industry. The 1960s saw increasing prices and the beginning of machine mining, sparked by the appearance of buyers acting for interstate and overseas interests. They also saw the first conflicts between machine and hand miners. The appearance of buyers from Thailand who accepted large quantities of lower grade stones for heat treating led to a high level of activity and increasing mechanisation until 1977. Conflicts between various interests on the fields remained, there were difficulties in administration, and illegal mining was rife. Much of the area between Rubyvale and Sapphire was opened to machine mining at this time. After 1977 a downturn in demand began as other overseas deposits, in particular Sri Lanka, were opened to the Thai buyers. Their control of markets worldwide continued. The 1980s saw significant changes on the anakie gemfields. Production continued to fluctuate as prices for sapphire rose and fell as a result of new deposits and technologies world-wide. Many machine miners abandoned the anakie gemfields to mine other commodities such as tin and gold because of higher prices. In 1985, the potential of an active tourist industry, with sufficient gembearing ground to support it, was recognised. The Mining (Fossicking) Act 1985 was introduced and Designated Areas and Fossicking Areas were established in 1986. Up until 1988, Australia produced up to 70% by volume of the world’s sapphire, but this decreased to about 25 - 30%.

What is sapphire?
Sapphire is a variety of the mineral corundum. It consists of aluminium oxide (alumina) and has the chemical formula Al2O3. Pure alumina is colourless, but its occurrence is rare in nature because various metallic elements occurring as impurities in the crystal lattice impart colours to the mineral. Traditionally, the name sapphire was used for clear, blue, corundum stones. Nowadays, except for the red variety which is called ruby, it is common to refer to corundum of other colours also as gem stones (green sapphire etc). The blue stems from titanium and ferrous iron impurities, whereas the yellow and the green results from variable amounts of ferric iron and ferrous/ferric iron respectively. The red of ruby comes from chromium. Sapphire has a hardness of 9 on Mohs' scale, second only to diamond. Crystals are commonly rounded to barrel - shaped showing hexagonal bypyramid form. The value of sapphire as a gemstone stems from its hardness, range of colours and brilliant lustre.

Mum, Kate and dad fossicking

We had been told that the Anakie Gemfields were a great place to go sapphire fossicking. From my map, the Anakie Gemfields were accessible either on an 80km unsealed (no tarmac) road from Clermont or alternatively about double that distance on a mixture of sealed and unsealed roads. We thought it would be fun and a true Aussie experience to go for the 80km of unsealed roads. It was fun, for probably the first 20km, but then as we saw no signs of life (or indeed any signs at all to tell us where we were heading) and the dirt roads got rougher and dustier we started to feel increasingly panicky as we kept driving and driving and there was nothing about at all but the odd cow. By my reckoning we should have been at the Gemfields, but we were so remote, we could hardly imagine anyone actually manning a tourist attraction here! At last we got to a junction with a sign, that said we were almost at a place called Rubyvale, a long way past the Anakie Gemfields!! Now, we were very confident in the fact that we had not gone past the gemfields without knowing because we would have noticed anything in the remoteness where we just come from! We were feeling very dejected as we decided to head for Rubyvale anyway and see what was there. As we neared the town we saw some signs for fossicking, hurrah! As we drove into Rubyvale it felt as though we were the only visitors that had been this way for decades, the few people in the street were staring as we parked up and got out of the car to see where we were. We decided to ask at the village store, but as we got there we realized it had shut down a year or so ago and the public toilets nearby were completely overgrown. It was like a ghost town! We found a store that was open and asked about the illusive Anakie Gemfields – they told us the Anakie Gemfields is the name for the whole area, it isn’t actually a place!! So, on my map I had been heading for the random place where the mapmakers had decided to write the name for that area – almost like heading for a place called ‘North Yorkshire’ in England!! There is actually a place called Anakie, but that is quite a way away from where we were heading.
We asked about fossicking and they told us the best place to visit was, a place called Miners Heritage. Here, you can visist Australia’s largest underground sapphire mine as well as try your luck with fossicking.

Kate stood on a steam engine

Our first stop in Clermont was the Museum and Heritage Park, which opened in 1988, and is packed (and I mean, packed) full of approximately 8000 historical artefacts. Items on display include cooking utensils, sewing, medical, hairdressing, photographs, typewriters and letters, there was anything you could think of that was used in everyday life. There were sheds packed full of engines and machinery, including a power shovel from Blair Athol mine, an old train, the old Masonic Lodge, an old steam engine which was used to shift the town after the flood, a shearing shed and fire engine - to name but a few.
The lady who was looking after the museum at the time was most welcoming and made us a cup of tea when we got there! She must have a lonely life as she said that we would probably be the only people she would see that day, some days she sees nobody. It was really interesting, and there was something for everyone. Dad was like a child in a sweet shop outside looking at all the machinery! He borrowed my digital camera and snapped away, we didn’t think we’d get him back in the car!
I had parked the car against a hedge whilst we were in the museum so that any passing undesirables would not see that the window was invitingly open, but we really needed to get it fixed as we were supposed to be fossicking that afternoon.

We turned up at a workshop where an unsmiling and extremely miserable woman told us that Fred was on his dinner for an hour and he probably wouldn’t be able to fix it anyway without stripping the car down completely. As we discussed our predicament outside, we must have looked so miserable that the big woman felt pity and came stomping out with a skinny weathered (and no doubt hungry) Fred who she said would try and help us after all. She stood with her hands on her hips as Fred set to work on the window. It took a fair while for him and dad to strip the door down before finally in a glorious moment the window slid up to the top!

I showed mum, dad and Kate around the historical sights of Clermont that Andy and I had seen on our previous visit, before we headed off to the Anakie Gemfields to do some fossicking!

Kate, mum and I on a train at the museum

My last few paragraphs may seem entirely random to most readers, but the quick ones amongst you may have made a guess at the subject of my pending story of our doomed drive to Clermont.
About two thirds of the way into the hour and a quarter drive to Clermont is a plaque detailing the ownership of the farming land and the history of the area. I may have mentioned this previously in the entry I wrote describing an earlier visit to Clermont. We pulled up to have a look at this plaque and were immediately attacked by the most flies I have ever encountered in Australia. It was awful, the air was thick with them and we quickly raced back to the confines of the car for relief. However, in the short time we had the doors open, and with flies sat on our bodies as we got in, the inside of the car was buzzing with loads of the pesky insects. At this point I would like to bring into play the first paragraph of today’s story, the window. I was driving and swishing flies out of the way, and in the pandemonium forgot that the window should not be wound right down. The rest of the drive to Clermont was indeed fly free, but we arrived completely wind swept and hot. When we stopped to try and pull the window up, more flies would dive into the car and no matter how hard we tried, we could not get the window back up!

Old Fordson Tractor at Clermont Museum

We don’t have a problem with flies or mosquitoes in Moranbah, probably due to the fact that there isn’t much for them to thrive on as it hasn’t actually rained for more than 10 minutes since before Christmas. Australian flies are so much more intrusive than English ones and very persistent. In England you brush a fly off your arm and it tends to get the message and go and find someone else to annoy, but here they are so much bolder - brush them away and within a few seconds they will be sat exactly where they were before, smirking at you. Therefore one or two flies on a walk can transform you into an irritable, muttering lunatic with arms flailing all over the place. This is obviously a form of entertainment and amusement to those people driving past who can’t see the minute cause of your distress. The final straw is when they actually start crawling up your nose and you have to almost pick them off your face to get rid of them.

While I’m on this subject, I was recently reading the latest edition of the Australian Geographic which stated that there are 20 – 30000 species of flies in Australia out of about 250000 species in the world. This took me a long time to digest, a quarter of a million different types of fly?!?! Who on earth has dedicated their life into logging and, presumably, naming these? How would you know if you had just swatted one in your house that was near to extinction or yet to be discovered? The same article, entitled ‘Fear and Loathing and Flies’, states that one of the earliest Europeans to have set foot in Australia, William Dampier, wrote in January 1688 after his observation of the Australian Bushfly: “The inhabitants of the country are among the miserablest people in the World… their eye lids are always half closed to keep the flies out of their eyes; they being so troublesome here that no fanning will keep them from coming to one’s face; and without the assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into one’s nostrils, and mouth too if the lips are not shut very close…”.
The article then goes on to say how we have tried to control them and kill them over the years. Here in Moranbah, as I said earlier, we have hardly any flies so can count ourselves lucky. I have heard that in other areas of Australia William Dampier’s observation is not far from the truth.

Old Clermont Fire Engine at Clermont Museum

DAY 6: February 23rd, Clermont and Rubyvale

A week or so before mum, dad and Kate’s visit we encountered a problem with the driver’s window on our car, if it was wound right down then it slipped and wouldn’t go back up again without being manually pulled by Andy. We didn’t have time to go to Mackay to get this fixed, and it was due for a service after they had left so we decided that it would be ok – we just wouldn’t wind that window fully down.

Mum, Kate and Dad having a barbeque

We weren’t actually allowed out of the minibus during our tour (for health and safety reasons), but it was still a really interesting visit. We got to see the whole process and even got a free cap, pen and lump of coal at the end of the tour!!
That evening we had a traditional Aussie barbeque and sat outside all night!

The hauler with our tour guide stood in front to give you an idea of size

The machines are all so huge in size, the tyres on the hauler pictured are 3.6 metres high and cost about £20000 to replace! On the mine site no-one is allowed to overtake any vehicle because it is too dangerous. The drivers of these haulers can’t see what is below them and there have been several fatalities at nearby coal mines where haulers and water trucks have run straight over 4x4 road vehicles.

Who was the biggest dragline until I came along? The DRE37 having a rest (look at the cars and vans in comparison to see how big it is)

The draglines are impressive pieces of machinery; each of the standard draglines is fitted with a 50 cubic metre bucket. However, those ones look like matchbox toys compared to Bucyrus DRE37 – the largest working dragline in the world, currently fitted with the largest bucket in the southern hemisphere with a capacity of 121 cubic metres! This beast weighs 7000 tonnes, but unbelievably only requires 2 people to operate it. Typically, when we went on our tour, the dragline was having a 10 week maintenance break so we didn’t get to see it in action. To look at this monster of a machine and then hear that it actually walks to where it needs to be is just unbelievable.

A loader filling up the hauler (took about 8 bucket loads to fill)

Peak Downs is owned and operated by BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance and has a production capacity of 8 million tonnes of coking coal per year. The mine has been running since 1972. You may recall me writing about Andy and I visiting the open cut mine at Dysart back in August last year, which uses the same methods as Peak Downs to extract coal.
At Peak Downs coal is mined by open cut mining methods:

- The vegetation and topsoil is cleared
- Blast holes are drilled in a 10 metre pattern into the rock that is covering the coal and up to 30 tonnes of explosive is loaded into the holes and detonated.
- Six draglines and tow truck/shovel stripping fleets are used for the overburden removal.
- The coal seams are then mined using front-end loaders and 240 tonne capacity coal haulers.
- The coal is then deposited into a 1000 tonne hopper ready to be sized, sorted and washed by the coal preparation plant. Coal is fed into the prep plant at an average of 2000 tonnes per hour!
- The coal is blended to customer requirements before being loaded onto a coal train consisting of 120 wagons capable of carrying about 10000 tonnes of coal, requiring 5 locomotives to pull it the 200km to the coast near Mackay.

A standard dragline in action

DAY 5: February 22nd, Peak Downs Mine Moranbah

For their first day in Moranbah I had planned a tour of Peak Downs Mine - one of the big open cut mines, about 30km south of Moranbah. They run a free tour around the mine site on the last Wednesday of every month so it had dropped on perfectly that they were here.

Ben racing out of the sea, with Kate and Andy watching... and the rain coming in the distance!

The drive to Habana, north of Mackay, where Ben’s kennels are is a lengthy one at the best of times, but after the huge journey up from Bargara it seemed a long long journey to get to Ben. But we did get there and a very very excited Labrador bounded out of his kennel to see everyone!
We took him to Blacks Beach, our usual walking place, which is the best beach around Mackay I would say. We paddled in the sea as Ben swam about. However, one problem was that there was no sunshine – just huge black clouds in the sky, which was such a shame because the beach looks so perfect in the sun. Just as we got far enough down the beach the sky opened up and the rain lashed down on us, we all raced back to the car, but the damage had been done, within 5 minutes we were all drenched!! Welcome to Mackay!
Well, it certainly refreshed everybody anyway, ready for the 2.5 hour drive back to Moranbah! Mum, dad and Kate at last got to see the views Andy and I see on our regular journeys back and forth to Mackay, i.e. the nothingness that exists for almost 2 hours of the journey! The poor drought ridden land couldn’t give any colouring to the almost white stumps of grass that were bravely hanging onto the last threads of life.

There are more trees than people would expect, the many varieties of eucalypt that are the great adapters and survivors of the tree population in Australia. In fact, there are more than 700 species of Eucalyptus mostly native to Australia, they can be found in every part of the continent as they have adapted to all conditions. Many are known as ‘gum trees’. No other continent is so characterised by a single genus of tree as Australia is by eucalyptus. Their bark dies annually so it is really strange to see ‘bald’ trees everywhere at the moment, or half bald as some shed only the top half of their bark. Eucalypts also have a rather dangerous habit of just dropping off huge whole branches as they grow to conserve water, therefore one should never camp beneath a eucalypt tree! Eucalypt oil is highly flammable and the trees can just explode, another reason to admire these unpredictable eucalypts at a distance! They do love a bit of fire though and the fallen branches and bark are highly flammable to help forest fires really get going. Many of the eucalypts depend on fire for spread and regeneration. One last fact on these interesting trees is that they can grow up to an incredible 92 metres tall – making them the tallest of all flowering plants.

We finally got back to Moranbah as it had just got dark and pulled up the drive to our house. It was so bizarre having my family there after all this time! I gave a quick tour around our house and then we all sat outside and had pizza and champagne to celebrate!!

Dad, mum and Kate on Blacks Beach

DAY 4: February 21st, Bargara to Moranbah via Mackay

With a huge driving day ahead, we were up early and set off for what was to be over 10 hours of driving to get back home to Moranbah!
Luckily, the car is insured for anybody so all five of us could take it in turns to drive. This gave everyone a break from the boredom of watching endless kilometers of straight roads bordered by endless kilometers of sparse trees and ever yellowing grassland pass them by. It was also fun for mum, dad and Kate to have a go at driving upside down in Australia!
We stopped several times along the way and had the obligatory McDonalds which was conveniently positioned at the roadside for weary calorie-seeking travelers like ourselves.
We got to Mackay just as everybody was starting to feel like we had been sat in the car forever, and the family got their first look at our nearest city. No time to stop though as we had a very important pick-up to make, Ben was eagerly waiting in his kennels to see grandma, granddad and aunty Kate!