thewills'wanderings

We’ve now been in Australia for nearly 2 weeks. Starting in Brisbane, we stayed at the Cedar Lake Country Resort in Nerang which is about 20 minutes from Surfers. That first week we were busy looking for a car to buy and figuring out how to get it registered in our name and insured. This is a bit complicated when you don’t have an Australian address, but we did it! We bought a bright red Holden Jackaroo, which is the same as an Isuzu Big Horn in NZ.

While this was all happening we managed to spend a day at Dreamworld and Whitewater World which was awesome. The 2 parks are connected and we got a 2 day pass so that we can go back again in the next 14 days. We’ll be back next week for a second go. It was so hot at Dreamworld, luckily there weren’t many queues. It was great to race over to the water park to cool off. The big girls are adrenalin junkies like their Dad and love all of the wild roller coasters and water slides. I have to confess to being a total scaredy cat. I hate the big rides and am very glad to have to stick with Charlotte and hang out in Wiggles World and play on the Nickelodeon water park which is so much fun. Charlotte would probably like to go with the big girls and if she was tall enough to go on the big rides I’m sure she’d have deserted me!

We then left Brisbane, picking up our caravan on the way in the outskirts of Brisbane at Steve P’s Aunty May and Uncle Mick’s place. While Tim sorted out the caravan, the kids had a big swim in the pool which was just what they needed! We then hit the road and headed north! It was nice to get out of the big city and start to explore. That night we stayed in a rest area in the caravan with lots of other campers/caravanners. Over here there are designated rest areas where you can stay for free for no more than 20 hours, so are perfect for a quick stop when you’re on the road. The caravan is very styly, with fancy woodwork and lots of mirrors and gadgets. That night we all squeezed in, with the girls sleeping on the floor. Today we’re buying a little tent for the big girls but it’s nice to know that we can all squeeze in if we need to .

The next day we headed north stopping on the way at Rainbow Beach, a totally spectacular spot where we played on a huge sand dune which overlooked the ocean. Very cool! Actually it was scorching and we couldn’t wait to dive into the sea when we got down . We then made our way to Bundaberg stopping at a very quaint little town called Maryborough which has statues of Mary Poppins everywhere because the author of Mary Poppins, PL Travers ,was born there. I bet you didn’t know that!

We arrived in Bundaberg and made our way to our timeshare, the Don Pancho Resort which is in Baghara right on the beach! For the past week we’ve been exploring the area and hanging out at the beach. It’s a beautiful area, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef . We visited a turtle rookery at night where we actually saw about 1oo baby turtles hatch through the sand and make their way to the sea. It was an amazing sight to see! Another day we had a typical Will’s day out, 4WDriving down a sandy deserted forest track. (that day deserves a separate post, so I won’t give any more detail on that!) Believe it or not, we’ve also spent quite a bit time getting into some schoolwork and establishing some routine in that department. The girls are getting into it especially little projects related to what we’re doing. Maths is a bit of a chore but Tim being Mr Motivation really helps!

We’ve met lots of other travellers, quite a few from Victoria who have friends and friends of friends affected by the fire so that is very sobering. There isn’t much else in the news over here apart from the floods up north. It certainly is a country of extremes!

Tomorrow, we leave here with our caravan and head for a town called 1770. Such a bizarre name, apparently named that because Captain Cook sighted it then. We’re going to camp there for a couple of nights and try to go on a trip to an island snorkeling. It’s weather dependent so hopefully we’ll get there. We’ll then head south again, back to Surfers to use our second day pass at the theme parks and start making our way towards Sydney. We have another cheap timeshare booked near Forster, about 4 hours north of Sydney on Feb 27^th.

Thanks for your interest! More photos coming soon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.