Leaving Faulty Towers Caravan Park in Yeppoon, to Rubyvale: Saturday 7 July 2012

Dave and I were delighted to be packing up our Shangri-La tent in perfect sunny weather. We couldn't wait to leave the Faulty Towers of all caravan parks; the place where they had a glossy brochure extolling their wonderful qualities, but were really the exact opposite. And I was glad I hadn't had to engage a good lawyer to get my Dave off a murder charge. The woman who was managing at The Poinciana Caravan Park nearly needed an undertaker to size up her body for a rather large coffin! Her attitude of continually telling us the Express Post mail hadn't arrived (knowing it was a credit bankcard inside) made me wonder what she was planning to do with it after we left? Only telling her we knew it had been delivered and Australia Post was going to investigate made her cough up where it was! Her excuse that she thought we were expecting a large parcel just did not convince me. Or was she really that dumb? Anyway, we were away from a place that had a perfect location near all sorts of amenities and a lovely beach, only lousy management and crappy broken timed showers managed to stuff this up.

Our ride for the day was along the Capricorn Highway, through to the largish town of Emerald, then on to Sapphire and Rubyvale. A beautiful day's riding, good roads and interesting scenery. Dave got excited seeing hundreds of bats flying around near a truck stop; something was making them fly around. He hasn't seen wild bats flying around before.

When we arrived at the little Rubyvale Caravan Park we were delighted with our choice. What a quaint little sapphire mining town, a good practical camp kitchen and clean amenities. And, most importantly, friendly helpful managers at this park! A little pub is right across the road, so we had a beer watching a bush sunset.

Seeking Sapphires on a Sunday in Rubyvale Queensland: Sun 8 July

Being the avid rock hound that I am, I couldn't wait to get out and about around the little dusty town to explore all the little gem shops that are dotted around the place. Today we have seen so many gorgeous differently coloured sapphires in all sorts of jewellery settings. Some of the little shops have absolutely stupid prices in the thousands of dollars, with the shop owners saying they are "retail prices" and they halve them for us. (Gullible tourists?) Others are more realistically priced. We had a lot of fun panning and sieving for our own sapphires at one place; cost us $10 and we ended up with a really nice little collection of some sapphires and zircons. I enjoyed seeing (and finding!) greeny blue sapphires; the yellow and pink ones were much rarer and this jewellery was way beyond our budget, but great to see anyway. Drooling costs nothing!

We rode to the little area of Sapphire, which is really just a general store and some sapphire gem shops along the road. Rubyvale is a better set up little town. Many of the gem shops have sapphire fossicking kits like we used earlier.

The caravan park at Rubyvale cracks me up because of a lot of the grey nomads here; they are so much older than others we've seen and they all seem to have little old dogs in the same state of decay as their owners; you can pick which doggy goes with each owner, right down to the dog blanket colours and their human counterpart clothing. Actually, since we have gone north of Brisbane, the grey nomads are getting older, slower and cuter and funny looking! Like there is a mobile nursing home system happening here in Queensland.