Days 80-82: More roadtrip!

Location: Approaching Gladstone, Bruce Highway.
Country: Australia
Day number: 82
Mood: Not quite awake yet.

So, I promised bi daily... or close to it anyway. The last blog was days 69 to 79 by the way. Anyway, day before yesterday we arrived in Hervey Bay after a long trip from Rainbow Beach. We pulled into a perfet car park, with hot showers, barbeques, covered tables and plenty of light. Just beyond the car park was a darkened service road leading to the beach, and after having 3 showers in one day (It was nice not to have to shower in cold water!) I proceeded to drive down the service road without lights as there were a bunch of rather drunk teenagers who had shown up in the parking lot.

Long story short, an hour after we went to sleep we had a cop banging on the door telling us we were breaking the law. Woops. After hurriedly packing up the top bunk, we proceeded to a Woolworths car park where we slept for the night. Meant we had to wake up at 6 AM though, which sucked! We headed back to our perfect car park, swam in the ocean (well, the others did, I was a wuss and only paddled. I had reasons though) and then sunbathed on the beach for a few hours. Had another hot shower, and then finally decided we were going to head in land. So yesterday Jerome and I took it in turns to start driving up the Bruce Highway. We've found some amazing views on these roads: sunsets, plains, mountains in the distance. In the evenings we look up into the sky and see the stars so clearly and so brightly it's as if they're close enough to touch. I can actually see the cloud of stars that is the milky way stretching across the sky.

So it was my turn to drive last night, and we were looking for a nice place to stop for the evening. We passed two lovely looking rest stops and decided to go on to the next one. Yes, of course, the third was awful. So, after a slight incursion into a darkened and rather unfriendly nearby town, we decided to back track the 35 km to the nice one. Great decision. The stop was manned by volunteers who were handing out free tea, coffee, biscuits and mints. Talk about an amazing reception! This morning they were back, so I didn't have to boil water for my coffee, which was really nice. It was also nice not to have to camp illegally and hope the cops didn't find us!

So today is a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. Sorry, just got distracted by a giant truck ahead of us. It has something on the back which is taking up both lanes of the highway. People on the other side of the road (on the highway) are having to pull into the grass in order for it to get by. Yes, I took a picture. Sorry, as I was saying, beautiful day. The coast was bringing all of the rain clouds in I think, so now that we're inland a bit it's clearer. Hopefully it will stay this way, it's much preferable to rain and wind.

We're waiting until we reach an internet cafe before we start uploading the pictures. I'm going to try and start uploading more to my Picasa album via my phone, but we're using a USB modem here, which is why I can write this from the car, and we don't want to use up all of the up/down load limit on it.

Right, I think that's all for now! As I said, I'm going to try now and upload those pictures, stay tuned. Hope everyone is well, be amazing as always. See you in a couple of days.

Andy