We continue to head north and the warmth!

Motorhome with car and boat
on trailer, FNQ

Picnic area towards
freecamping, Rollingstone

We had heard a number of recommendations about various camping sites on the way to Cairns so we decided to head to the coast and move towards Cairns in two hops. We travelled just 180 kms today across the Hervey Range Road and bypassed Townsville as we will visit there as we commence the trip back to Melbourne down the East Coast. As we came down the range road we were pleased to see orchards and soon stopped at a house and bought a supermarket bag full of mandarins for $2.50 - what a bargain and beautifully flavored and sweet as well. Firstly we tried to camp at Balgal Beach which has a small camping area right on the coast. Unfortunately it was full and bookings were not taken so we moved on to Bushey Retreat at Rollingstone. The camp has about thirty sites and as we were early in the day we were able to get a nice site. This area was badly damaged in the cyclone early on 2011 and access to the river is still closed off but there is no other evidence. We enjoyed going for a long walk this afternoon and spent time socializing with other campers. We will possibly stay here another night as we only have 300 kms to go to Cairns to meet up with Roanne and Roger and the children on Tuesday.

 Warm enough for dinner
outside, Rollingstone

We have been having a bit of trouble with our Dell computer. Contact with Dell suggested that we would have to return the computer to the service department as they diagnosed problems with the motherboard. It was extremely difficult to explain to the consultant, who was possibly based in India, that there was no point in sending a courier to our Box Hill address to pick up the computer. He had no concept that we were travelling, that we had no fixed address, that we were living in a caravan (in fact asked for an explanation of what a caravan was)and the distance we are from Brisbane. We decided to try and avoid sending the computer to Brisbane, and walked down to the local store and she plugged the computer into 240 watts for an hour and we seem to have overcome our problem. Obviously the inverter is not sufficient to charge the computer.

Our camping area,
Rollingstone

The weather is now lovely and warm and we were able to sit outside and have dinner after Peter had cooked the steaks on the BBQ before going for another walk. Lots of campers have camp fires and it is a really relaxing environment.