We enjoyed our day of exploring the Glass Mountains area, but I’ve not yet processed the photos. I don’t think they will be great, but will give a sense of what it is like. Steve Irwin’s Australian Zoo is also in that area but after viewing the website we didn’t feel it was something we needed to do.
In the morning we went to one of the lookout areas and started to climb up to it. I gave up when the steps stopped and it was a matter of scrambling over stones. I just seemed to be losing my balance a bit. Stephen also found the climbing hard going. We had brought lunch with us to enjoy at a viewing point, so we humbly went back to the camper to enjoy it there.
Our next stop was the Visitor Information Centre. We felt self concious putting on masks for this, but were pleasantly surprised to find the volunteers working there were wearing masks.
By then we realised that there was a viewpoint we could drive to, so that is what we did for the rest of the afternoon before returning to the campsite.
Yesterday we decided to make some more progress north. We arrived at a possible overnight camping spot, had lunch, then decided to go further. There was a lot of road noise from the highway, plus we still had energy to tackle driving further on the A1. The M1 has morphed into a two lane road, fortunately it has frequent overtaking lanes and a lot of the time passing is not allowed. I gather it’s a pretty dangerous road and they are trying to tame the wild Queenslanders to follow rules, quite hard I think. There are a lot of road works happening and although we had no stops it allowed us to travel at 80kms, which feels safer. We are hoping the road West from Rockhampton will be a bit less frenetic!
Wikicamps found us a number of places to be overnight, but this little country pub seemed a nice option. They even have pensioneer style meals (smaller and cheaper) as though they’ve seen our sort before. There are fewer people staying here than we’ve seen at other places, so that is nice as well. We are on a bit of a slope, but decided to live with it as the bed is in the correct orientation (higher at the head than the foot) and having the evening meal out meant I didn’t have to try to cook on the angle. We could have levelled up, but it would be our first time in this camper (see how I’ve adjusted to the NSW/QLD language) and I felt a bit nervous.
We are still having mostly cool nights snuggled under the doona, but it was still comfortable to sit outside for our evening meal. We were able to keep an eye on the camper as I had left the windows open and even in this quiet place I was a bit worried.