Blogs from Gympie, Queensland, Australia, Oceania

We awoke fairly early thanks to our complimentary wake up call care of Ethan who, like us, was not much enamoured with getting dressed and facing the day. after breakfast we sat outside on the front porch basking in the sunlight and planning our journey northwards. Jody-Ann and Jeremy live with the lovely 8 month old Luca and the wisely cheeky faced Ethan down stairs in a house beautiful self contained house which Ian has been renovating. the night before we were given the grand tour while Ethan watched Veggie Tales, a Christian moral based video series which i again have fond memories of from my time in Alexandria (the jazzy Rumour Weed was a definite favourite). Sunday lunch was a lively family affair, being a joint birthday celebration for Ian and a family meet up ... read more

Situated on the Gympie/Tin Can Bay road, we arrived at Standown Park. We take our hats off and salute, the vision of Rod and his wife Pam for their drive and total commitment to the betterment and welfare of returned service personnel. They have created a camping/caravan park dedicated to war vets, and warmly welcoming all non service people as well. To Stand Down is a military term instructing a soldier to Stand down from active duty, how appropriate. We set up camp on a large grassed area, just near the forest, but not too far from the well built camp kitchen and amenities block. Rods' wingman is Landers, we only knew him as Landers, greets every new arrival with warm and genuine friendship. Every night at the going down of the sun he gets the ... read more

Kids have all flown the nest and much as it was lovely to have us all together for a week Pete and I have been looking forward to starting the next phase of our trip so we headed for Toowoomba to catch up with old friends from way back to spend a couple of days with them. We had a great time trying out Mattie as we camped next to a church which adjoined our friend’s house and slept in her once again. Tried out the shower which was great once Pete had remembered to turn the gas on! Toowoomba is huge and lots to see and do but we unfortunately had to return to Cornubia to pick up mail that had arrived for us so didn’t see much of the city. It is Queensland’s largest ... read more

Our last day in Noosa was looking like it was going to be wet, wet, wet so we decided to take the Valley Rattler steam train which used to be a big railway station during the gold rush but since the gold has run out Gympie (yes this is the name of the town) is now a sleepytown dedicated to the history of the gold rush era. The train itself was very old and had the traditional wooden carriages inside, it reminded me of the Harry Potter train. It ambled along at a slow speed and everyone who saw us on the way stopped to wave. When we reached the destination the train had to remove its engine and drive it onto a turntable thing. Then the drivers had to push it round so that it ... read more

DAY 365 This is the second time we have had to type this document, the first one was finished this morning all 4100 words saved then word crashed and it was lost. Again I was up at silly o’clock this morning, we had a big day in front of us driving, we stayed the night in this wonderful free camp site at St Lawrence Rodeo Ring, we had been advised and true to words, it was excellent. This morning at about 6.15am I asked Caroline if she wanted her tea now or leave it a little while, I really did want to get a good start on the day, as I wanted to get back as far as we could tonight so our run back to the Sunshine coast on Sunday would be a fairly short ... read more