Time to leave Tracy's - boooo. One last morning of waking naturally to sunlight coming though the window, the dogs pattering around upstairs, the birds singing loudly in the otherwise perfectly quiet street, smelling the wonderful mock orange flowers that smell of jasmine, and sitting outside in the softly warm early morning sunshine out the front. We said goodbye and left around 10-ish, heading off on our four-night mini road trip.
The days that followed were mostly spent sitting in the car, watching the changing landscapes go by, or sitting on the beach, and we stayed in little cabins in tourist parks. I'm not really one for sitting on a beach, I get bored and restless, and there isn't very much to write about when you're not doing much, so this post covers all of those days.
On the Tuesday we went to Magnetic Island off the coast of the city of Townsville. My stepdad and I went for a rather strenuous walk from one bay to another and back, which was good, then we all went for lunch at Cafe Nourish, which did "Heart and Soul Food" - basically healthy, nourishing, nutritious stuff. My kind of place! I had an all-day breakfast item of a fresh tropical fruit salad with coconut yoghurt, homemade granola and almond milk, with a banana-honey smoothie. Yum! After that walk all the fresh melon was very welcome. That evening we had dinner in Townsville, and it was nice to have a bit of time, even if it was just an hour, somewhere modern and cosmopolitan - "civilisation", as my sister called it. Wednesday we spent at Horseshoe Bay on the Whitsunday Coast - very pretty, with pale sand and turquoise water, but rather windy. Late afternoon we headed off to Cape Hillsborough, where we would stay for two nights. It's in the middle of nowhere and we got a little lost trying to find it as it was getting dark, but found it eventually. It's the kind of place that has no wifi and almost no phone signal, and the nearest shop (other than the park's one that sells basics) is half an hour away. But you can see wallabies on the beach just before sunrise, which is why we went there. That was cool :)
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| Magnetic Island |
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| Whitsunday Coast |
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| Cape Hillsborough |
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| Wallabies! |
We had to go out for breakfast on the Thursday, so drove half an hour to the nearest supermarket in the town of Marian. The "town centre" was funny, like a small retail park rather than a high street, but it had a big supermarket and a good cafe where we had breakfast (I had poached eggs with spinach, mushrooms and hollandaise sauce on sourdough toast). We also all sat in the cafe antisocially looking down at our phones for half an hour, taking advantage of the free wifi, which had been scarce the last couple of days and would be non-existent for the following 24 hours. Back at the tourist park it was too windy to sit on the beach so my sister and I sat by the pool for a few hours - her in a bikini in the sun, me in jeans and a long-sleeved top in the shade, haha. Lunch was turkey salad wraps, then I went for a walk along the nice, huge and almost-empty beach that was littered with volcanic rocks. For dinner we'd bought some barramundi fillets and had them pan-fried with some veg and salad - simple but tasty.
Friday we left the tropical warmth of Queensland and flew south to Sydney!
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