27-30 December, 2011
We had a few hundred kilometers to cover today so it was good to get going reasonably early. And even though we thought we got going pretty quickly – we were out of there by 9am, the next occupants of the site were ready to move in straight away!
Childers was our first stop for some fuel, for both the car, and our tummies. As it turned out is was much easier to fill the car than it was to fill a human. BP satisfied the needs of the Prado, while we had burgers and chips from a Vietnamese takeaway… (yeah, it tasted about as good as you would expect!)
Dave, Kate and the kids arrived at Landsborough Pines only about 10 minutes after us, so we set up together under ominous storm clouds. The storm circled us nicely and we pretty quickly had ourselves set up. An old school friend of Rach’s joined us for a BBQ dinner with her family which was great.
We experimented this time with an “L” shape configuration, which worked really well. I think we’ll try and do this again in the future.
The next day was a pretty cruisey one, catching up after Christmas and relaxing. We took the kids up to a playground at Landsborough, which was awesome. The kids had a great time and burnt off some much needed energy!
The big day of this leg of the trip was dedicated to Australia Zoo. We were staying only 5km down the road, so a quick breakfast had us on the doorstep at 9am. We spent the day exploring and enjoying the wide open nature of the Zoo, and were constantly amazed how close we were to the animals. This was a really impressive Zoo, and I’d recommend it to anyone traveling to the area.
The show in the ‘Crocaseum’ was fantastic (the Irwins even made an appearance) and included a brilliant bird show (my favourite part) and some pretty impressive Crocs (of course).
The highlight for Ella was the Pony ride. She was quite smitten by ‘Rascals’ and now wants her own…
Happy Birthday Lucas!
Lucas turned 2 on the 30th December. Aside from spending the day wondering where the last 2 years with our little man has gone, we went to visit the legendary Ettamogah Pub. We had a really relaxing lunch here to celebrate his Birthday. Lucas loved watching the motorbikes come and go from the table we had right next to the carpark.
GIven this was our last night here, nobody was surprised when it rained just after dinner. We were pretty surprised to find a gorgeous little tree frog hopping through the annexe just after the kids had gone to bed. We got them up to have a look. Lucas was particularly excited (he loves frogs at the moment) but didn’t really want to touch it.
We did a little tidying up before heading to bed to hear a couple more small showers falling on the roof.
It was fine in the morning for our pack up (much to Dave’s relief) and we pretty smoothly packed everything away ready to head to our next destination – Neurum Creek – for New Years Eve.
The 4 nights here takes us to 71 in total.