Funny place

Before we left Berwick, Fred had given the car a little service and also new plugs. Because we have gas the plugs need to be adjusted a bit, the gap has to be a bit smaller then with fuel. He had done that but most probably not enough (we thought) so we had a few backfires, that means that you get an explosion of unburned gas in the exhaust pipe. Suddenly something under the car made a strange noise and we figured out it must be the muffler.

So when Danny had left, we let it fixed.

Afterwards we found out that it weren’t the plugs which caused the backfires but bad gas we had tanked.

Sunday 2^nd of June;

We are leaving Cairns and the new muffler smells terrible. I first thought it was the engine because we are heading towards the Tablelands and have to go the way to Kuranda, pfff the road is so steep and windy again, frightening!! Danny knows, we have driven it before but without caravan.

We are making a strange move now as we are going back a bit. I told you that we might go back to Townsville and maybe we will but that’s not the reason. Family (who look after our post) from Victoria are travelling as far as Townsville with a camper van and because we also wanted to go to Charters Towers, we will meet there!!

On our way over the Tablelands through Mareeba and Atherton, we passed this windmill field, always fascinating to look at;

After seeing the windmills we go on our way again..... 

Our first stop was in Ravenshoe, what a funny place was that! It was actually, of course one out of my bible, a free camp spot but when we got there we also could get a site with power and because the Tablelands are high (we were at 950 mtr above see level) we thought we might need our heater (and we did), just $ 12,-/night we had to pay! Great.

It’s a camping spot on a railway precinct and on this Sunday, heaps of volunteers were working on the railway. It looks like they were trying to restore the whole lot. Later one of the volunteers told us that they had to replace 17.000 sleepers, Crikey, that’s a lot!!

a little jail!

it really felt we were camping in a museum....

Just a few shots of the town....

We stayed 3 nights and had a relaxing time, catching up with e-mails, phone calls and Skype to family. The strange thing was that we had better reception that in Cairns.

Ravenshoe, the highest town in Queensland....

5^th of June.

Between Ravenshoe and Charters Towers is not much. The Kennedy highway is very nice and I had a strange experience. I thought I saw Elephant bums but then realised there are no Elephants in Australia. These bums are ant castles. Thousands of them and each castle houses thousands maybe even millions ants. So you hardly can imagine how much ants there must be.

The castles have different colours too, grey, yellow and red, depends on the type of soil.

We didn’t see a car for nearly half an hour.

The road became very narrow at some stages, even the Garmin lady was confused and lost track. 

 

We stopped in Greenvale, a nice big caravan park in a trivial small village. She, it was a lady owner, was actually too expensive so the park was nearly empty. I can’t understand such thinking, when I said something about the price she said; because it’s high season, bugger that; hundreds of k’s before and after that caravan park is nothing, heaps of grey nomads pass and her park is empty. If she would have place a sign on the road with “ powered site $ 22,-“  she would have had a full park, I’ll bet ya!

We will continue our way soon, see you then!