Blogs from Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, Oceania

Long Dayyyyy...,, Up at 5:45 and down in the garage by 6:30. The lift at the MARRIOTT to the garage level was broken so I got a guided tour of the maintenance areas of the hotel to get down to my bike. The MARRIOTT Brisbane -BTW-was a great choice if you decide to visit Brisbane. Excellent location and great rooms and staff. I'm going keep this blog a little short and talk more about the two day combined ride in the next blog. Once I loaded up the bike I was on the road by about 6:45 but it took 45 minutes to get on to the M1 and eventually the A1 and out of the City. I covered only 12 miles in those 45 minutes. Brisbane may only have 2.5 million people but the city ... read more

We left Rockhampton not very happy. We paid $75 for our room but the WiFi did not work, the washing machine was broken and the hairdryer in the room did not work. The lady in reception did not seem too bothered. We drove south via a show cave and had an hours tour with Emily our guide. Continue down south for the most important part of the day. The Bundaberg rum distillery tour and meet up with Colin “Spike” Bale and his wife Sandra and father in law John. Our guide Damo gave us a big insight into how my favourite drink is made and we had 2 free shots of rum. An aged rum and a banana, toffee and rum liqourre. After the tour Colin met us in the car park and guided us to ... read more

This was another day where we hadn't planned anything other than drive south. After returning to the highway, we drove a short distance before the traffic became quite heavy (the Bruce Highway is mostly single lane with short passing opportunities each 5 kilometres if the terrain is flattish). We decided to pull in to the Flaggy Rock Creek Cafe for coffee and cake. They had home made ice cream too so we had to try the mango but it wasn't anything like what we had enjoyed previously at Wild Mango in Kununurra. Because Georgi wanted to spend some time in her early home town of Gladstone, we decided to stop early in Rockhampton (so we had plenty of time in Gladstone tomorrow). We refilled the gas bottle, topped up the bus with diesel and found a ... read more

Today we went to see the Heritage Village, as it had free entry due to the Emergency Services Day. The event has been going for seven years and shows the locals what the various emergency organisations can do. It also gives people information on what they can do to prevent or cope with any emergency or disaster. We entered through the Information Centre and picked up maps for both the event and the usual Heritage Buildings and Museums. The first thing we saw was a display of clocks dating from 1630, that had been collected by the local watchmaker, Ernie Gomershall, and his family over many years. They included Grandfather Clocks, Cuckoo Clocks and some obviously French clocks. Many were similar to each other and most of them weren’t labelled, so it was hard to tell ... read more

Our Mount Morgan Tour was due to start at 10.30am at the Tourist Information Centre of the town so we were up and out quite quickly this morning. We arrived at the lovely mint green coloured Historic Railway Station Museum, which also housed the Info Centre, with about 10 minutes to spare – just enough time to take a few photos and have a look at some brochures. The tour minibus turned up soon after and the ten of us doing the trip piled in. Our guide took us around Mount Morgan and showed us some of the older buildings, including an old cinema with a colourful mural showing some movie stars in their movie roles (e.g. Marilyn Munro with her white dress blowing up; Clint Eastwood in the “Go ahead – make my day” movie). ... read more