After Airlie beach we were still a days drive away from Cairns so we broke it up into two smaller drives with a few stop offs at points of interest.

Our first stop off was at Townsville which is known as Australia's sunniest town with an average of 320 days of sunshine per year, not bad ay! With the odds in our favour we arrived on a sunny day yipee! We walking around town for a while then donned the swimwear and went in search of the 'Rockpool' which is a man made swimming hole just off the beach (no swimming in the sea due to stingers). After a 2km trek along the esplanade, that doesn't sound far I know but in the sticky Queensland heat it feels like a marathon, we found the rockpool only to discover that it was closed for cleaning!! They could have put a sign up at the beginning of the esplanade to warn us!! Instead we set up on a grass embarkment just behind the beach, the beach did have stinger nets but neither of us wanted to risk it. Later that afternoon we found a campsite with a swimming pool, parked the camper and jumped straight in to cool off....ah bliss!

The following morning we packed up, got back on the Bruce Highway and drove to Paluma Range National Park, which is the Southern gateway to the Wet Tropics. We headed towards the Mount Spec section of the park where we'd read that were some rock slides you could play on. We first discovered rock sliding the first time we visited Cairns on the waterfall tour so we wasted no time in throwing ourselves down the rocks. We of course did a risk assesment first which consisted of me checking the depth of the water after each slide, I failed tremendously and slipped on the wet rock and fell in anyway - the water was deep enough so all good! Unfortunately for me Davie was witness to my fall so there was lots of pointing and laughing. Anyway we had a fun filled morning sliding down the rocks and jumping off the rocks (Davie isn't happy unless he has jumped into the water from a rock / tree / railing - don't worry risk assessments are conducted in all cases).

After Paluma we got back on Bruce and headed towards Tully which is famed for being Australia's wettest town and to prove it they have built a giant golden gumboot (welly) 7.9 metres to represent the record amount of rainfall (7,900mm) they received in 1950. Tully is also a popular place for backpackers to complete their farmwork because of the surrounding banana plant and sugarcane farms. For the record the bakery in Tully also makes excellent pies!

From Tully we continued along the Bruce Highway (what a great name for a road!) until we were just shy of Cairns. The views along this stretch of road were spectacular because it runs adjacent to The Tablelands mountain range.

When we checked in at the campsite Davie said to the guy "what a beautiful part of the world this is" and the guy replied that we'd struck it lucky because it'd done nothing but rain recently and we'd arrived on the sunniest/dryest day they'd had for a while and then he casually added "oh by the way we're on cyclone alert - they think it'll hit by the end of the weekend. That'll be $38 for the night please" We looked at each other in shock - not because of the price, sounds expensive I know but it was an ensuite powered site dont cha know! but because we were once again going to face the possibility of another natural disaster - remember the bush fires we'd narrowly avoided at the start of the trip. Anyway we grilled this poor guy and gathered as much info as possible and it turns out that the cyclone was offshore and the worse Cairns would get was lots of rain and gale force winds with the very small possibility of it hitting the mainland. Nonetheless we kept a close eye on the news the following day.

So the final night we spent packing our bags and cleaning our beloved campervan and reminising on the great holiday we'd had. It seemed quite apt that our first roadtrip started out in Cairns and we'd eventually come full circle ten months later.

The following morning we awoke feeling a little sad that we had to hand the camper in but happy that we'd had such a great trip. We drove the 10km to Cairns, checked in at the backpackers - same one we stayed at the first time, then found Travellers Autobarn where we had to say goodbye. 4,940 km and four weeks later we'd made it along the East Coast in one piece with some epic memories (and a giant pile of washing!)