Back to the comfort of the caravan



Gill's help to inflate the tyre doing 'B' all

We took our time packing up in Mt Carbine as we had spent our last night in the tent. As we expected, the tyre was flat again so Peter used his trusty on board compressor (amongst all the other toys he has) and pumped the tyre up so that hopefully we would get to a repairer without having to jack the car up. That certainly saved a phone call to RACV!. My role this morning was to sit in the car and read my e-book while Peter pumped up the tyre. It was clearly not a two man job.

We have now put the tent on to the roof rack along with the stretchers and these will remain on the roof, at least while we have good weather. We are not sure when or where we will need to next use the tent. We have enjoyed our three weeks tenting and certainly look forward to next time.

The tyre was staying up so we headed to Port Douglas, which was only about 70 kms away. The road took us down the range and we were able to stop and take a couple of photos of Mossman and the coast.   We followed a truck carting sugar cane down the range.  I was keen to see if any of the banana plantations were selling bananas but no such luck.  The are plenty of plastic bags on the trees protecting the fruit so it can't be long before they are ready for picking and the price of bananas in the shops will reduce from the current $13-$14 kilo.

Fortunately we made it to Port Douglas without the tyre going flat and found a tyre repairer who was able to fix the tyre and put it back on the Patrol for us. While they did the hard work we enjoyed a leisurely lunch at the Central Hotel which gave Peter the energy to again clean the car. It is amazing how that red dust sticks.

Once we collected the caravan we headed south to Cairns and booked into a caravan park for three days to give us the opportunity to catch up with our washing, emails and for Peter to try and upload the photos on to our blog. This task has taken hours as he had three weeks of script to add the photos too and you can be sure he did his fair share of moaning!

The caravan park mainly caters for permanents but was fine for us. We unpacked the car and found space again in the caravan and generally sorted ourselves out again. Peter is glad he is at the end of uploading our photos of this stage of our holiday - perhaps his moaning about doing this will now come to an end!

We have now been on the road for just on eight weeks. We have completed section one of six of our trip around Australia. We have travelled 7,888 kms since we left Melbourne on the 4th July. We are four days ahead of our time plan (each of the six stages of our holiday being approximately two months). We next head up on to The Atherton Tableland and travel towards Normanton and Karumba.

View of coast north of Mossman

 View of Mossman