Today was supposed to be a short trip down to Airlie Beach for a couple of nights, but it turned out to be a lot longer than expected … lucky we’d planned on a short day!

We packed up the van by 8am and said ‘bye bye house’.  We had to take the keys back to the agent before skipping town, that was the first detour.  Precious little parking area near the agents office meant that there was a bit of a walk to return the key.

No big deal … back on the road for about 5 minutes and there’s a huge patch of slow on the road out of town due to roadworks.  No big deal, at least we were moving.  … and then we weren’t.

The news came over the CB that the road up ahead was blocked by fire and it’d be awhile.  We were quite stuck.  A big drop off on the left and an impassable median strip on the right.  Every now and again the traffic would inch forward as a few cars in each direction managed to sneak through the fire.  Probably not the smartest move …

The fire kept getting bigger and closer to the road and it was only a matter of time before it was officially closed.  I figured out that if we could do a u-turn we’d be able to take a 30 km detour … if only we could turn around.  Eventually we got close enough to a break in the median that I was able to do a 6 point turn with the van and get us pointed back northwards.

The queue was massive as we passed everyone lined up.  We had been right near the fire front and thus nearly through the blockade so it was a bit of a gamble taking the detour.  As we took the turn onto the detour the news again came over the CB that the road would be closed for 3 hours so we breathed a sigh of relief.  When got to Bowen the news came over the regular radio that the road had been re-opened so we made the right call on the detour.

In grabbing a few geocaches around the country i’ve been blocked from grabbing it by snakes on a few occasions, but this one was ridiculous!

Kel and kids try to convince the snake to let us grab the geocache

Geocache was finally found under the rock near the snakes tail.  Too easy really.

Next stop was Bowen for lunch, but we didn’t have enough of a look around there.  We missed a fair bit it seems, on reflection.

Airlie Beach was reached about 3pm, instead of 1pm that we’d planned.  We timed our van setup on this occasion.  From the time the van was in place on the site, it took us 10 minutes to unhitch, level it, make the beds, pop the roof, setup the awning, hook it up to power/water/drainage, setup the camp chairs and stools and sit in them with cold beer in hand checking out the brochures.  Pack up is never quite so quick … I suspect due to there being no beer at the end of it 🙁

Local quackers being hand fed

We’d had enough today.  It seemed just too long, too hot and too difficult.  I think we might need a holiday …

Dinner was at the pub across the road.  Huge meals and cheap drinks soon returned the smiles to our dials.

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