The Campervan Adventures

Chapter 7...'Are we there yet Mum?..'

Time for a detox and a couple of days on the road to reach our next destination- Airlie Beach.

We're over halfway through our five weeks on the road now and (bar the first days calamity) we're really enjoying the drive.

Airlie is about 850km up the Queensland coast from Hervey Bay and so we have two quite long journeys to our two stopover points. Long drives coupled with needing to recover from all the Fraser fun, meant we didn't do too much bar washing (ourselves and clothes) eating and sleeping. So with not a lot of exciting things to write about I thought I'd share with you some of our observations on Australian roads.

I say roads, but to be hones it's pretty much just one road the entire way (which minimalises the risk of us getting lost) but one bloody long road at that. I don't think either of us realised quite how vast this country is. Between towns you can drive for, in some places, a 100km between towns through just land and towns without seeing another car for long periods. But lack of cars is made up for with over the top amounts of road signs. The Aussies love a road sign, many of them pointless, some of them comical and others just downright strange. One of their particular favourites is to warn people not to drive whilst tired...
'Don't roll over in your sleep'
'Rest or R.I.P'
'Tired drivers DIE'
'Break up your drive...arrive alive'

They even have ones which say 'Trivia games save lives' followed by trivia questions and answers spaced out on signs along the road... If you ask me, what causes driver fatigue around here is having to read all the bloody signs!

They also have a range of signs- ones whose purpose I'm not entirely sure- which say:
'Are we there yet?'
'How long to go Mum?'
'How long to go Dad?'
'Still a long way to go kids.'
.. Maybe we're missing something here..?!

As well as a sign (or 12) telling you to rest they are fond of over the top signage/ restricted speed limits and amount of people controlling traffic around roadworks or even if they're just doing some tree trimming. Whereas on England you might have a slow down warning sign and a few cones, here it takes about ten signs, starting at least 5km away, countless cones, blocked off lanes and about 20 people dressed in high vis with walkie talkies to control the traffic with stop/go boards (it also seems to operated a stop/go board you have to have a rather large beard..I'm not sure if this is a requirement of the job or just pure coincidence..)

Anyway, I digress, we were loving being back with Dolly and in our little home. In fact we missed her so much instead of staying in our dorm the night we got back from Fraser (which was included in the price of our trip) we slept in Dolly in the hostel car park.

Friday morning we said our goodbyes to our Fraser Friends and set off for Rockhampton. As we are getting further north the weather is getting wetter. According to my friend the Lonely Planet, Queensland has a cool/dry season and a hot/wet season, the latter being what we are in now so a frequent shower is expected. Not long after we set off for Rocky one of these rather heavy showers hit. On go the windscreen wipers..correction.. Wiper, as in singular. Yes, while we were away enjoying ourselves in Fraser some nasty b******s had launched an unprovoked attack on poor defenceless Dolly and stolen one of her eyebrows (ie. The entire wiper arm). Poor girl.

We managed to find her a new eyebrow on our way to Mackay the next day and she is now fully restored to her beautiful self. Probably a good job too from what we've been told about the rain in Northern Queensland. Although we arrived in Mackay to beautiful sunshine, the campsite receptionist informed us it had been raining there constantly since September..could be needing our rain macs a lot more as we continue towards Cairns.. Let's hope Dolly can swim !!