North Queensland

How is this for a sunrise - over the ocean at Kurrimine Beach - now that is something we don't see in WA, so I had to get a photo. I love the awesomeness of sunrises, every day is different and they especially remind me that God says His mercies are new every morning - no matter what yesterday held, we can start afresh today. That is something I am always grateful for.



We left Brisbane on Wednesday last, and spent three days driving north, covering 1400kms in the three days. The kids were great and enjoyed the travel time reading, looking at the copious amounts of sugar cane that lined the road and watching an afternoon dvd! We praise God for keeping us safe on the road and are grateful for lovely travelling weather too. We stopped at few free camp spots, and in MacKay on the way up, and arrived at Kurrimine Beach on Saturday, 100km south of Cairns.

Here we stopped to have a break for a few days at a great van park in this beachside holiday town, a bit like Lancelin. It was peaceful and quiet and just what we needed after all that travel. The kids enjoyed the pool and we enjoyed walks on the beach, and the very balmy sunny weather - 28 during the day and about 20 at night.

On the first morning we were there Darren came back from the beach with some coconuts for breakfast! Everyone had fun trying to get the husks off and get them open, which required an axe, a drill, a hacksaw and a screw driver, we tasted the milk and then ate some of the flesh, which was fun and rewarding after all the work it took to get it! It has been interesting for us to see the change in weather and the change in sunrise and sunset as we have travelled north - there is so much to learn on the road. It is hard to believe they live up here in relative summer conditions all year!

Darren, Jerome, Josie and Grace visited the Tully Sugar Mill to learn about how the sugar cane is processed. It was a very interesting expedition - the sugar cane must be processed in 16 hours from the time of harvest, the sugar mill runs 24 hours a day from June to Nov and it is completely self sustained by its own electricity production by burning the begasse (rubbish sugar cane stalks and leaves) which runs the steam turbines that operate the heavy processing machinery. It has a very sweet and sickly smelling, like raw sugar/molasses and it was very loud as they walked through the processing plant.

Tully is Australia's wettest town, its average rainfull is 4490mm - wow! The highest one day total is 1140mm (no that is not a typo) and it also holds the record for the most rainfall in one year getting 7900mm in 1950. There is a big gumboot in town that is 7.9m tall and we climbed up to see just how much rain that was!

Today we travelled to Cairns, officially 5100km from Perth, as far away as possible - it will only be closer and onward home from here! It is warm, sunny and tropical and we are blessed to be staying in the driveway of the Winiarski family that we met in Brisbane a few weeks ago, although they did warn us about the rats, cane toads, sandflies and snakes that a often about, yuk! They have a wonderful garden full of lots of tropical fruits, including some banana palms - they generously gave us a hand of bananas and they are the fattest bananas we've ever had, delicious too. They also have a cane train line right behind their back fence so that is a winner for everyone and particularly for "you know who", who will be out there three times a day without fail I think! We've already seen two go by today and Jerome has decided this is all the sightseeing he wants to do in Cairns for the next few days!!

We look forward to doing a Reef tour and some day trips to Mossman, Port Douglas and Kuranda to see this wonderful part of our awesome country.