Long day on the road today thanks to the Queensland Government’s Roadworks program. Left Airle Beach in good time, pushing out of the caravan park just before 9am. We hadn’t gone more than 10 minutes down the road before we hit our first lot of roadworks. Probably wasted a good 45 minutes trying to navigate the traffic jam, before finally hitting the Bruce Hwy and heading north towards Townsville. By lunchtime we had only made it to Ayr, where we stopped for KFC. This was Zac’s final birthday wish given there wasn’t a KFC around Airle Beach for his B’day dinner.
After lunch we were back on the road and back into the roadworks. We followed the Bruce Hwy north before turning off and heading around the mountains south of Townsville. At this stage we gladly stated that thank god there should be no more roadworks… but no, that was not the case and I think there were more roadworks on this road than the Bruce Hwy!!!
On the Bruce Hwy we managed to travel about 10kms before the next round of roadworks, but on this road it seemed like it was every 100m!!!
Anyway, 6 hours later having only travelled about 280kms we finally turned west onto the Flinders Hwy that will take us to the centre. Finally we found a good road with only minimal roadworks to contend with and made much better time able to travel 110 kph for a couple of hours.
Obviously we didn’t get as far as we wanted today, and decided to pull into a little run down caravan park in Pentland for the night. This place is real hicksville, and I think the owner is missing a few marbles, but for one night we can rough it.
And rough it we are… this place is so run down, the concrete slabs are all broken, the toilets are disgusting (although Kate told me the girls toilets were ok), and it wasn’t long before the boys discovered a dead frog in the boys toilets!! Not the 4-5 star Big 4 experience we have become accustomed too!!!
Oh well, it is just for the night, and tomorrow we will push on to Mount Isa about 6-7hours away. The remote part of this adventure has begun 🙂
