We travelled north through Brisbane and stopped for lunch at Caboolture. We thought we might stay somewhere up around Maleny, but in the end we found a relatively cheap caravan park near the Glass House Mountains, so named by Captain Cook in 1770 because of their resemblance to glass manufacturing houses back in England. It was called the Glass House Mountains Tourist Village and located on the now named Steve Irwin Highway about 10km south of Australia Zoo. On the way to the caravan park, we stopped off at the Glass House Mountains Lookout which gave great views of these interesting 25 million year old volcanic peaks. On Sunday we drove up to Maleny, stopping briefly at Mary Cairncross Park which had great views of the Glass House Mountains from the north. In Maleny we wandered ... read more

We travelled the short distance from Murwillumbah to Byron Bay on Wednesday 8 April, arriving before noon at the Byron Bay Tourist Village. This was very handy as it meant we could be allocated a nice dry camp site separated from the main crowd of campers that were arriving during the next few days. Byron Bay is inundated with people over Easter, a large portion of which are like us and are here mainly for the East Coast Blues and Roots Music Festival. The rain that we had been having further north had also occurred here, so the general camping area, although nice and grassy, was covered with pools of water and mixed with a bit of mud. Fortunately our camp site was nice and high and we never had any problems with water or mud ... read more

We left Girraween National Park on Monday morning and headed up the New England Hwy through Stanthorpe and Warwick. We took the Cunningham Hwy across the Great Dividing Range into Ipswich where we stopped for lunch. Then it was into the southern Brisbane suburb of Rochedale to stay at the Gateway Village Big 4 caravan park not far from the Pacific Hwy/Mwy (but the traffic wasn't too noisy). On Tuesday, after dropping the Landcruiser at Toyota for its 40,000km service, we caught the bus into Southbank near the city. We spent a couple of hours at the museum and then met another ex-Darwin friend of ours (Pete) for lunch near Streets Beach. We had to be careful while eating lunch as there were a number of ibis trying to scavenge food. One lady had her pizza ... read more

We left Grafton and headed northwest towards Glen Innes on the World Heritage Way (Gwydir Highway). We had a brief stop at a lookout over the Gibraltar Ranges and then drove into Bellbird Camping Area in Washpool National Park. After setting up camp, we did the short Coombadjha Walk. Annelies and Thomas had a paddle in Coombadjha Creek but were a little wary of eels that had been spotted in the water upstream. We had a fireplace at Bellbird with firewood supplied, so we utilised the hot plate for dinner and also cooked a 'cherry jam roly poly' for dessert. While preparing dinner, Thomas spotted a lyrebird nearby. The next day (Friday), we did the 8.5km Washpool Walk which took us through Wet Sclerophyll & Dry Sclerophyll forests and pockets of subtropical rainforest with huge Red ... read more

From Myall Lakes, we headed up the coast towards Port Macquarie. At Kew, we headed east and stopped for another lunch of BBQ sausages at North Haven Park. Our main reason for visiting Port Macquarie was the seafood buffet at the Port City Bowls Club held every Wednesday and Saturday nights. We had chanced upon this place two years ago on a hire-car trip from Brisbane to Sydney (via Byron Bay) and had had a feast at the buffet. Thomas had just turned 7 at the time and ate so many oysters, prawns and mussels that a lady stopped by and remarked that she had never seen a boy enjoy his food so much! So one of the few aims we had on this trip was to revisit the bowls club for another seafood buffet. As ... read more