Australia is BIG. Unbelievably big. It's hard to appreciate its humungous size until you've taken a road trip or two. Over the holidays (Easter/Anzac Day/term break) we decided to spend a week in Queensland. Like, decided the
night before we embarked on such an adventure. And what a week it was! I'll do a series of posts because there are just too many experiences & pictures.
First of all: 18 Hour Road Trip. Yahoo!! It got off to sort of a rocky start. Between leaving all my underclothing & D's church clothes sitting in neat piles at home (swimsuit & jeans on
Easter Sunday is a bit unfortunate) and taking the wrong road out of town for an hour (think small, curvy, country route and 2 puking kids) it was rough and loooong. But it was a sensationally beautiful drive and the navigational mistake let us happen upon the "largest caves in Australia" so three cheers for the silver lining!
We broke it up into 2 days each way with some cute and quirky motels. But despite bringing about 20 books on CD from the library, we were mostly entertained by the various sections of countryside, each landscape unveiling unique beauties and vegetation. Little towns, waterways, thick "bush," animal-grazed meadows, farmland, rolling hills, Australia's got it covered. We took the inland route up and the coastal route down and boy, did it make me want to spend our next vacation in almost every quaint beach town we drove through!
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| never thought of wombats as the 'dart out into traffic' kind |
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| Kensers on the foot bridge - great place to run off steam |
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| one hotel had this cool room service box and the other had a swingset/tramp: score! |
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| blessed technology :) these guys were champs |
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| witnessed some great downpours with subsequent rainbows |
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| I had to take a pic of this posh McDonalds we hung out at while the car was getting serviced |
The last leg of the trip, we got a flat tire (tack on another few hours) but thanks to a trusty small town postal worker, we were spared another night on the road. In true, friendly Australian fashion, he magically produced the tools to cut the lock off our spare (neglected to bring the key) and some pipes to add the necessary torque for our stubborn old tire. Between that and the blessing Darren gave to the less active LDS guy who owned the pizza joint we happened upon at a pit stop - the journey was almost as memorable as the vacay!
