47 Good Things 24 August 2012

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All good things come to an end, so we are typing this up on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Brisbane suburbs, with the sounds of a rock band filtering up from the village green a few blocks away.

We really haven’t done much of note over the last two weeks; it’s pretty hard to keep describing the 20 something temperatures and the white sands. We’ve been playing tourist and winter refugees as we travel, so after 1770, we had stops at Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Coolum and now Brisbane.

We’ve tasted overproof rum (high alcohol, low flavour), took a Hummer tour onto Fraser Island (NOT taking our Landcruiser there) went whale watching in Hervey Bay, (or were the whales people watching?)

Eventually we arrived back at the Coolum Beach Campground, which was our no 1 in March 2011, and gets a second mention as number 125 (or is it 124?). Anyway, it’s a good one to finish up with as there is direct access to a kilometers long sandy beach, close to shops and a new supermarket and many good coffee shops.

In Queensland, the only time a vehicle has to pass any sort of test is when it is offered for sale, so we had to get Safety Certificates for the car and caravan, and also a Gas Certificate for the van. For the first and only time, the car developed a fault in Hervey Bay – a diesel injection pipe sprang a leak and had to be replaced. Pretty good for 50,000km.

We had put ads on the Web earlier, but got little response until we advised that we were on the Sunshine Coast. Lots of interest in the Landcruiser, less so for the Coromal. Anyway, we have disposed of the caravan to a dealer in Noosa, and then brought the Landcruiser down to Brisbane where a dealer also bought it. Ironically, Don had called in on them when originally scoping out the rig in October 2010. They remembered us, or said so, and we did a good deal. Luckily we have some family in Brisbane, so some odds and ends were able to be passed on, but we did give some clothes etc away to Vinnies, a local charity.

So, this is the end of the adventure, after 60,000km in the car and just over 29,000km in the van between 22 March and 11 October 2011 and then 2 March to 24 August 2012.

We’ve met lots of great people and made some new lifelong friends. The weather was great, rain in Gympie, Emerald, Kings Canyon, Esperance, Melbourne and Launceston only, and only in Emerald did we have to pack up in the rain. Rain on 6 out of about 378 days!

Best place: hard to single out as there 124 of them, but central Queensland, the Channel Country, would be a favourite, and Winton the pick of them (just) Lots of local rural history, explorers, cattlemen, drovers and shearers and other renegades and characters, and every campground has story tellers, poets or singers, and they work hard to look after the grey nomads.

Disappointments: none.

Would we do it differently knowing what we know now: No, the Toyota Landcruiser and the Coromal 615XC were ideal for our trip. (However, next time it will be different because we’ll be doing different things)

Cheers and thanks for reading these blogs.

Scroll down past the ads, etc for more photos.

D+P

26 August 2012

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Photos

Hervey Bay
Whale watching and vice versa

Fraser Island
Wreckof the Maheno

Fraser Is Dingo
They have been known to eat children

Kookaburra
Right by the caravan

Our rig
Car, caravan, bicycles, etc