Heading for Texas

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We got a fairly early start to our day and said goodbye to our kangaroo filled tourist park. We set the GPS for Texas, Queensland and at first it started to try and send us on a route that would have taken us over the mountains on a dirt road. We quickly made adjustments and headed instead up the coast toward Grafton. The Pacific highway cuts through a number of quite touristy looking towns along this stretch as well as passing several banana plantations. After a few hours of heading up the coast, the highway turns inland towards the town of Grafton. Our Iphone, with the international sim card, kicked in at this point and let us know we could finally use the vodaphone network and good thus make normal calls. We stopped in Grafton for lunch and gave Greg and Lisa in Texas a call. We were finally able to speak and Greg kindly repeated their invitation to come stay with them. We got directions to his parent's place, and headed off again.

The highways here are quite easy and we made good time despite heading through high hilly land as we moved away from the coast. We passed through large forested tracks that could easily be mistaken for parts of Ontario and then gradually the landscape became drier and we started to see first small, then huge cactus plants at the side of the road.

The final road towards Margaret and Bruce's farm takes you across the river that divided New South Wales from Queensland. At the same time the time goes back an hour so we were in good time to make it for dinner. Bruce and Margaret gave us directions to Greg and Lisa's house, but somehow we overshot it and ended up visiting the neighbours briefly. Fortunately Greg drove out and set us straight.

“Island Home” is a quaint homestead built in the late 1800s with a huge amount of farmland surrounding it. Joining us for dinner were Dougal (Greg's brother), his wife Sonia (who teaches at the local school) and their two children Olivia and Cameron. We had an excellent “All Aussie” dinner featuring steaks from the barbi and Pavlova, tam tams, as well as Australian wine and beer. Comfortably fed, the four of us adults all crashed while Benjamin and Joshua watched a movie.

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