Agnes Water to Brisbane

18/01/2013
  Through the middle of the day it was so hot we had to leave the beach and take shelter from the sun. At 4 o’clock it had cooled enough for us to go back and have a splash about in the surf, but 4 o’clock is close to beer o’clock , this heat plays havoc with our routine!
 It also plays havoc with trying to keep the beer cold, so now we have taken to filling the eski with stubbies and whacking 4Kg of ice on top, as the poor old fridge can’t cope. We do this every day and it works well, we can also get food in the fridge now.
 Being on the beach today for a couple of hours has topped up our tan, but we have been in the sun for the last 21 months and must get a mole check hen we get home. Moving on again tomorrow, we will miss Agnes Waters

 19/01/2013
  A most uncomfortable drive today in this extreme heat. We got away by 8 30 when the temp was nudging 30 and it just got hotter until 4 30 when it cooled a little. We avoided quite a lot of the Bruce Highway by cutting across country to Bundaberg, the home of Bundaberg Rum.  Eventually we got back on the highway as we had a cunning plan to visit Gympie where we know of  2 second hand book shops.
On our travels we have acquired a lot of books , far too many to carry on our onward journey and not worth sending home. We know these shops will buy our books off us for a reasonable amount ( we have been here before), but, sods law, it’s Saturday and Gympie being a typical country town, shuts for the weekend at 12 o’clock. So,  we still have 2 shopping bags full of books to get rid of.
 After trudging round the town laden with books in the heat of the day we found the only place open, an Italian Restaurant where we had a late lunch.  We sat and dripped into our Ceasar salad and steak burger then drove a few K’s out of town and parked up in a scruffy rest area for the night with heavy goods thundering by every few minutes. Never mind, it is free and we have an eski full of cold beers, the sun has gone down along with the temperature, down to 30 now!

 20/01/2013
  An uneventful night on our bit of dirt by the highway though we had the pleasure of a whiz bang joining us late evening. Whiz bangs are small campers with a sliding side door that never seems to be in the right position, judging by the number of times it is whiz banged open or shut. ( We will be in one for the duration of our trip to New Zealand)
 We are now in Brisbane and have spent a very pleasant couple of hours over lunch with Marion, our friend whose house we lived in last September. It was good to see her but we can’t linger as time is pressing. We are putting the kilometres in but not quite in the right direction as we are still going south when really we should be starting to go west. We promised to call in on our friend Jim last year, in Forster and that’s where we are heading, we reckon to be there in a couple of days. After that we have just 20 days to get to Perth, 4,400K away Time to speed up.

 21/01/2013
  Up at the crack of dawn for an early start getting away by 8 30, then a brief skirmish with  a supermarket car park which we couldn’t have got into because of the height of our van. That mission abandoned the myopic navigator proceeded to get us hopelessly lost in the Brisbane suburbs. It’s a 15 minute drive from our campsite to the motorway south. One hour and fifteen minutes later we eventually found it having toured parts of Brizzy we didn’t know existed!
 From then on it was plain sailing along the freeway that was the Bruce Highway and is now the Pacific Highway. That’s because we have crossed the border from Queensland into New South Wales.  Bye Bye Queensland.
 We are now free camped in a very nice green field close to the road and behind a Shell servo, north of Coffs Harbour. So far there is just one other caravan and four kangaroos keeping a close eye on us for company. The weather has changed dramatically, rain, black clouds and probably 10 degrees cooler than yesterday. With any luck it will be widespread and put out the bush fires.