Travelling the Bruce Highway

We are continuing our journey down the eastern coast and sometimes we wonder
why we didn't take the inland road as apparently it is shorter in distance.
The condition of the Bruce Highway which runs from Townsville through to
Brisbane is very poor. Most of it is two lane with the condition of the
bitumen in need of attention. There are road gangs working on the roads and
it seems that we barely get going again and we are stopping for more road
works. We understand that between Rockhampton and Bundaberg (a distance of
less than 300 kms) there are twenty nine separate sections of road works.
No wonder we felt as though we were stopping and starting again. Some of
these sections even had a pilot vehicle to lead the traffic through the
section of road works and a tail end Charlie to follow the last vehicle -
what a boring job for those guys and girls (as there are lots of females
working with the road gangs).

Besides road works the other memorable thing is the sugar cane. Both sides
of the roads we had large areas of sugar cane growing - the harvesters were
working in some areas and the small sugar cane trains was taking the crates
of cut cane along the tracks.

We had thought that we might pay a visit to one of the sugar cane processing
factories, but the whim soon lost our interest and we were keen to get to
the end of our journey so gave a miss on that.