Townsville to Moura

We're definitely on the run home now. It's sadly even starting to feel like it.

We had a couple of nights in Townsville while the car was serviced. This was its second service since being away. Those kilometres just keep ticking over.

In Townsville the caravan parks don't rate very highly or were not dog friendly, so we ended up camping at the Seventh Day Adventist Church grounds which were close to the centre, right on the river and very large. Quite amazing really, churches certainly have money.

One of the rules there is no alcohol outside the van, so you're not able to sit under your awning and have a beer. How un-Australian! This effectively kills any Happy Hour around the camp-site :(

We sat out with Bailey and drank tea.

Wide open space to camp in

We haven't been to Townsville in many years and it's grown a lot in that time. We drove the steep 3 km to the top of the lookout while it seemed like the rest of Townsville was running up there. We would have also run up but Bailey wouldn't have made it so we had to drive.

We've been looking for a really nice camping spot on the far-north east coast where in the future, we could stay for a few weeks to save us driving all the way across to Western Australia to get to Ningaloo Station. Many people had told us about Rollingstone Beach, and we've wanted to check it out for ages to see if this was a possible contender.  This meant a huge detour from what could have been a great inland route home through outback Queensland, but we're really glad we did it.  We would have hated being stuck here for 3 or more weeks at Rollingstone with nothing to do. 

It's just 50kms north of Townsville, so after getting the car serviced we had allocated a week there to get a feel of the place and booked a beachfront site. As nice as the Big 4 park was, with jumping castle, large pool, bar and restaurant it really wasn't us. There's nothing around this park.  No swimming in the ocean because of crocs, and other than the caravan park beach, just lots of properties that have big "No Entry" signs on them. The beach was sloped so walking on it was tough on our hips, even Jayne found this.  We wondered how anyone could spend weeks upon weeks here. What do they do? There's nowhere to launch the boat. Beach fishing is possible, but if we're going to go fishing and spend hours looking at our lines in the water, we need something else to occupy us, not just standing on a beach! People stay here for months.

Our site was very good though

We managed two nights and felt it was time to move on, besides Jayne was starting to get red dirt withdrawal symptoms. So we headed inland again to Charters Towers where we broke out the bikes, locked Bailey in the van for a couple of hours and headed out for coffee.  Charters Towers was an old gold town with a great history.

Charters Towers has some cool old buildings

And nice scones

South from Charters Towers is Theresa Creek Dam. Camping is available right on the lakes edge for $15/night. Grey water is an issue here and this started to get us thinking of how to manage this. Certainly you can't drop your grey water just on the ground when you're camped this close to the lake.

Theresa Creek Dam

They advertised that they have dump points for your grey water, but these were ages away from where we and many others were camped. We did the right thing and carried ours 100m up away from the lake, however we didn't see anyone else doing anything with theirs. If there want people to follow the rules, they have to provide facilities so they can.

Just near Theresa Creek Lake is the abandoned Blair Athol Mine, which I had done work for in my former life

Heading south from Theresa Creek Dam we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn finally leaving the tropics after 6 months, except for the time we were back in Sydney. We hope it's warm enough down south for us tropical people! The days are worm enough so far, but the nights get a bit chilly and we're going to break out the quilt tonight. Hmm, I wonder where that's been stored?

We found a caravan park on Lake Maraboon, which looked promising. They have provision for dogs, but the comments on Wikicamps told us they weren't real dog friendly. We thought we would check it out, so we drove in. The dog camping is segregated from the rest of the park, up the back so no view of the lake. The dog camping area was about 30% of the park, but it was 99% full and the rest of the park was almost empty.

We didn't want to be cramped into a small site, when the rest of the park was basically empty so we moved on without staying there. It just goes to show you the demand for parks that cater for people travelling with dogs.

Camping at Springsure Showgrounds

Springsure Showgrounds were a real gem to camp at. We arrived just as they were packing up all the horses and cattle following the Springsure Cutting Day, a major horse event in the area. The facilities there were top notch.

We kept dawdling south and came across Dawson River Rest Area, 7kms north of Moura. We knew this was a busy rest area and that you had to get in early to get a good spot. We arrived after lunch which was late and the place was nearly full. Somehow we still managed to score the only van spot with a river view.

Only water view van site in the place and we scored it!