RBandSue

We’d almost forgotten what 6am looked like, but we were up at the crack of dawn to try to avoid the worst of the Sydney traffic to get to Toronga Zoo. It’s only a 38km drive, but takes about an hour avoiding tolls – but up to 2 hours during rush hour traffic! Looking at the area around the zoo on the map there were some parks and café’s so we decided we’d get there early and have breakfast out, then head to the zoo for it’s opening time, 9:30am. The traffic was awful! Even at this early hour, not helped because there had been a bad accident on the toll road so local traffic was much heavier and also there were roadworks closing off one of the roads to the zoo! We eventually arrived and ... read more

Nice early start and breakfast on the go as we’d already used our single set of wooden cutlery for dinner last night! We also wanted to get to the Koala Hospital in Port Macquarie when they opened at 08:30 to see the Koala’s being fed their morning leaves. We were greeted on the way in by one of the many volunteers there who explained what they do and ran through their current resident koala’s on the status board which detailed when they arrived, what the issue was and the cause if known, and what they were doing to help them. The issues ranged from disease (Chlamydia mainly), dog attacks, falling from tree’s, car strikes and a little joey being orphaned when his mum drowned in a swimming pool. They had some lifetime residents there too who ... read more

The weather today was due to be a bit cloudy and turning very windy in the afternoon, so we decided to jump in the car and head inland to do a tree top walk. We had tried to do this previously way back in our trip when we were travelling along the great ocean road, but found it was closed! There were two options near to the Gold Coast. O’Reilly’s Tree Top Walk in the Lamington National Park, and the SkyWalk at Mount Tamborine. We set the sat nav on the phone to O’Reilly’s, it was about a 90min drive which isn’t too bad. The route was smaller roads, no motorways, which we prefer. The sun came out, we had the windows down and were enjoying the drive. We spotted one of the creative post boxes, ... read more

Fairly early start today, we’d setup google maps on the phone to take us to our first stop for today – Brisbane Koala Bushlands. The initial route showed a 2 hour delay on top of the 2 hour normal drive due to an accident on the M1 (just like being at home!). We changed the settings to avoid motorways and toll roads and it changed the overall time to about 3 hours. This sounded like a much better option, we weren’t in a mad rush and prefer the smaller roads to the motorways anyway. So off we went, passing through some lovely little towns on the way, with some old buildings and some interesting post boxes. Not sure if we’ve mentioned this before but the people living in the more rural area’s have post boxes at ... read more

We missed our morning beach walk as we were running a bit late and needed to get on the road. What a lovely motel, as we drove out the lady who checked us in, made sure to meet us outside the office to say goodbye and also recommend a couple of places on our route today. It makes such a difference when you find one of these gems to stay at, just a shame we only had one night there. Our aim today was to get to Bundaberg, but it was a long way so realistically, we were going to try to get as far as Rockhampton. It was another scorcher today, 32 degrees with the humidity making it feel more like 36! One of the recommendations we had was to stop at Sabrina Sugar Shack ... read more