"It's quite a nice day, isn't it?" said Sally. "Quite!" I exclaimed, "Quite!" "Quite?!" This was some understatement to say the least. Sally and I had just walked into the sea on the Gold Coast in mid October, which may mean more to those of you reading this in England than those overseas (yes, we have an international following)! Close your eyes for a minute (well, don't literally, as you won't be able to read the next bit) and picture an empty white sandy b...

The next stop, at Rotorua, or 'Road to Rua' as in the title (Bob's idea again!), was every bit as exciting as we expected. We hadn't done the original planned route to Rotorua via Lake Taupo which is the tourist route, but had veered off to do the East Cape as in the last blog. This meant we had to go back down inland to get to Rotorua but we are so glad we did. There are a lot of thermal parks to choose from, but we chose Te Puia which is home to the famous Pohu...

Well, where has that 2 months gone? When we left to do the 'Queensland Loop' the distances looked daunting, and we had a new van to get used to. Would we like it? Would we survive? So I thought for the final blog on this part of the trip I would go through some of our thoughts and impressions, and also some of our low points, as there have been some! We have travelled 5833kms, used 771 litres of fuel and have stopped at 37 different camp sites. The camp sites ha...

"This is Australia." The Central Highlands of North Queensland are probably not No.1 on the main tourist route so, when we called into the very helpful tourist information centre at Emerald, we picked up the necessary brochures to carry us over for the next day or so of travelling. The tourist information centres are an absolute 'mine' of information (well, we are near the gem fields!) and extremely helpful. We have found this in every place we have been to in Q...

Having driven up the Bruce Highway to Cairns we decided to return via the Great Inland Way. We thought that this would give us a gentle introduction to driving longer distances, and meeting 'road-trains'. How wrong were we!! For us, it has been like being in the Outback, although this is not technically classified as such - long, straight roads that stretch into the distance, red dirt corrugated roads, and single track bitumen, but more of that later, and no phon...