We we have made it to the East Coast and here we are with our caravan up against the sand just north of Townsville in Rollingstone.
We spent a night in Hughenden, nice little town apart from the caravan park. Now picture this, caravan park with drive through sites, shady with wash down booth for vehicles, 30 metre swimming pool. We get there, pay our money and drive around the back to park the van, that is the main railway line just over there, what the heck let's just have a swim. Trice and I wandered off looking for this enormous pool, well we found it, it is the bloody public swimming pool next door which is closed for maintenance. That night when I went outside it was like rotten egg gas so I raced back inside. The next day I asked one the the council guys what that smell was? "What Smell?" was his reply. I think they are all immuned to it cause it really did reek!
Hughenden's main business since the early days is Cattle & Wool - It's all brought here by the road trains from the whole region to the rail yards for distribution.
Hughenden is part of the dinosaur trail, they have dinosaur replicas everywhere made out of fibreglass, scrap metal, you name it they have made it. If you look closely at the photo above, there is even an old shovel for the front leg. We dropped into the FJ Holden cafe for breakfast and met Francis James and Jan Holden, quite a unique little cafe with all types of holden STUFF. Even a sticker which said that they would rather push their holden than drive a ford - how rude. I made sure I pointed out to Jan that they had a Ford Sierra car model on their top shelf, she said that that was OK as Peter Brock drove that one.
We have heard about the Prarie Hotel so we stopped on our way to Townsville, there was an older couple sitting on a bench outside who had been there since 9.00am, it was now 11.00am and the pub was still not open, "Oh no, we are too early again" "seems to be the way our whole holiday has been. A young girl next door suggested that I go down to their house and get them to come and open up - I said it was OK and we headed off to Charters Towers, the home of the first Stock Exchange in Queensland. It was a very rich town in it's hey day and the architecture reflects that which has been beautifully preserved. The townfolk of yesteryear named Charters Towers "The World" as they thought they had everything there that they could possibly need. Hence the naming of the World Theatre & a painting of the World on the side of a building.
We stayed in Townsville last night and had a lovely dinner with some friends. Dropped in and had a coffee with Larry and Sharon before heading off to Rollingstone.
After getting from Tennant Creek to Townsville in just 3 days we are pulling up stumps and just chilling out for a couple of days. It has been eventful in that our air conditioning packed it again so we were stuck in Charters Towers for 4 hours getting it fixed again and the biggest tragedy of all is that my computer has gone on strike. It looks like either Windows is corrupted or the harddisk has failed, I am hoping it is the first which I can't do anything about until we get home so unfortunately the bloggs may cease until my computer is fixed unless Trice let's me
onto her computer. All my photos and videos are on my computer and if the disk has failed then I may have lost them. So I am now going to grab myself a cold Rum and Cola and sit back and watch the water wash onto the sand, it is just so stressful and I can hear you feeling sorry for us having to put up with this life. I know it is hard, but being the caring sharing people that we are, I thought that we would save you the trouble of having to sit here just listening to music, having a drink or 2 or 3, bugger I missed my afternoon nap....
