Friday...4 July 2014

Yesterday was moving day again. Townsville to Mareeba.

Nearly six hours non stop driving. Seriously. No toilet breaks and we even ate lunch as we drove, I packed a corned beef and relish sandwich (as a back up in case there was limited opportunities to buy lunch along the way), which we ended up eating while we waited at one of the many roadwork stops. I have on occasion been known to be less than generous with my opinion of some of the roads in Queensland, but I have to hand it to them, they are throwing huge amounts of money at the Bruce Highway which is their part of the National Highway #1. It is probably why some of the other roads are less than perfect, all the money is being spent on that one road. On our travels yesterday we were stopped seven times and the distance was only 390 km. Some of the delays were long enough that Himself turned the engine off and we wound down the windows to admire the fresh air and whatever scenery we had available to us.

It was necessary to cross the Great Dividing Range again and regular readers of this blog will no doubt remember my apparently hilarious descriptions of previous trips over this particular patch of hilly terrain. Yesterday the joke was on me again. This time, not only did we have to climb tortuous hills, but on one of them I thought we would end up sliding back down it as we were stuck behind a rather large motor home bus which was towing a car trailer and doing all of 5 km/hour. 

Now like I said earlier, the joke really was on me as we had steep hill climbs, slow traffic AND absolutely bucketing tropical rain! So heavy at times the wipers were useless and one simply guessed where the road was! So I chewed my nails to the elbow (again!), recited several Hail Mary's and made up a few more, and there we were, slip sliding our way over the Range in the pouring rain on a goat track. A great days drive...NOT.

However there is always a rainbow after such heavy rain and for us the pot of gold was arriving in beautiful sunny Mareeba and just now as I have been writing this entry, some friends have pulled into the same caravan park, so we will have a very happy Happy Hour tonight.