It took us nearly 7 hours on a sweltering day to get from
Hervey Bay to the little seaside town of Mulambin Beach, on the other side of
Rocky. The park we stayed at had a huge water slide that I even had a crack at
(gasp!), and a thousand other activities for kids. The park is set amongst
tropical gardens right down the street from the beach.
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| Weeeeeeee! |
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| Captain Ellysia. |
We went back in time for an avo and visited the Rockhampton
Heritage Village. We couldn’t go through the whole complex, but we got to see
an impressive collection of old clocks and turn-of-the-century memorabilia.
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| Welcome to Rocky Heritage Village. |
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| This beautiful Spanish clock dates back to early 1600s. |
Rockhampton is dubbed the “beef capital of Australia”. This
clearly gives them the right to plaster the town with bull and cow statues. Seriously,
we lost count at 20 something. The best for me was the blue cow. Why a blue
cow? I have no idea!
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| Blue beef anyone? |
It turns out the Tropic of Capricorn goes right through the
centre of Rockhampton. Who knew! So we made the most of this by doing something
very educational (namely, investigating other imaginary lines on the globe), and
by doing something very un-educational (ie: straddling the actual imaginary line
of course!).
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| You just haven't lived until you've had one foot in the north temperate zone and one foot in the south temperate zone. |
We caught up with Conrad’s work mate and his lovely wife and
daughter while we were in Rocky too. The girls had a blast hanging out with a
new friend and we got to try some of the local fare – fantastic!
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| Ellysia's "kids pie" was nearly as big as her head! |
On the way to Longreach, we stopped in to the mining town of
Blackwater. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere is this small mining town that
hosts the amazing International Coal Centre. This is a museum dedicated to both
local mining history and the Australian coal mining industry as a whole. Conrad was absolutely fascinated and we all learnt more
about mining methods and the size of a dragline supporting chain – that’s
2 things off my bucket list!
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| That's us in the dragline bucket. |
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| Bit of history that made us a bit homesick. |
Where to next? Well, I’m slightly nervous about the next leg
of the journey. We are now going out! Yep out back. We were originally going to
go all the way up the coast and then come back through outback Queensland on
the way home, but as we’ve been travelling it’s been getting hotter and hotter.
We started thinking we would be crazy to head west at the start of December,
when we could do it now at the end of October. So in we go! Or out, depending
on how you look at it. Amongst other places, we are going to follow the ‘dinosaur
trail’, which is a series of country towns that have some made some incredible fossil
discoveries in the last 10 years or so.
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| We're off to chase some dinosaurs. |
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