Pretty Airlie Beach, Queensland: Thursday 2 August 2012

Dave and I are enjoying a relaxing stay at Airlie Beach; the Seabreeze Caravan Park is across the road from the beach where we can see some of the Whitsunday Islands. This really is a great friendly Park; the managers actually enjoy their camping clientele, instead of treating us all as if we are in a reform school. They organised a great country folk duo called Lou Bradley and her husband….can't remember his name but he was good too! She has a lovely voice and has been nominated for an Aria award, writing a lot of her own lyrics. She has performed with Slim Dusty and Casey Chambers and family, and I bought a CD. She was real cute….a hippie from a while ago and now worrying about her kids! As we all do ha ha!

Tomorrow we're going on a boat trip around some of the Whitsunday Islands, with a ground tour of 2 islands. Getting the Seniors discount is good, and we have found with all the tour boat companies around here, the prices are competitive.

There is a fitter kind of grey nomad in this place; no old "sitters" with fat little dogs. Many of the people are off riding their foldup pushbikes, or going for hikes. And it's good to see some more young European backpackers in their little vans; we didn't see any in outback Queensland.

Today we rode our motorbikes to Hydeaway Bay and Dingo Beach, which are 50km out of Airlie Beach. Both very pretty secluded beach spots, no shops, just rather flash looking houses, which surprised me. The tourist brochures say Hydeaway Bay is "far from the madding crowd" and so it is. No retail therapy here.

The roads into this area are beautiful with wide swooping bends, lined with sugar cane fields, some of which have just been harvested, and a range of volcanic mountains in the background. The soil here is dark from the volcanic action aeons ago, very fertile. We came across some stretches of roadworks; the local council is keeping the Airlie Beach area roads in pristine condition; pity roads around big coal mines couldn't be the same! The big mining companies really need to be made to put more into the regions where they are making profits.

When we went walking into little Airlie Beach shopping town, I found that I can hire snorkelling goggles for $10 a day, and, they are prescription goggles! I tried several in a hire shop and found that a minus seven rating of prescription snorkling goggles suits my blind as a bat eyes. Great! Now all we need is weather that is warm enough to go snorkling….snork snork! Unfortunately it won't be warm enough to do this on our big Whitsunday Cruise day tomorrow.

Snorkling piglet Trish (Soon to find out the difference between a strudel and a creamy apple turnover!)