The McCookie Travels: November 2014

What an amazingly diverse country we live in! A month ago we were in the dry, red, sun scorched desert of Uluru and a hop, skip and a jump (well, over 2000km’s to be precise!), we are in the lush, tropical rainforest of Queensland!

Arriving in Townsville, we started heading up the coast and met up with friends in Innisfail who had also been travelling. The Dad, who was originally a builder in Avalon has decided on a complete career change and is now a skydive instructor there! This “time out” seems to do that to people, although I can assure you all, neither Steve or I are going to become skydive instructors!

From Innisfail, we met up with 2 other families we’ve met on our travels and enjoyed time in Cairns, using it as a base to explore some of the local attractions. We particularly enjoyed our time at some of the beautiful gorges in the area, great to cool off in as humidity was starting to rise! We then headed upto Wonga Beach and particularly enjoyed our stay at the Daintree National Park, where the rainforest meets the sea! The kids had a ball on the beach, albeit due to those pesky crocs couldn’t actually go in the water!!

With the temperatures and humidity rising, we headed to the Atherton Tablelands, to a very pleasant 30 degrees and no humidity! We are really enjoying our time here. Initially we spent a week on the banks of Lake Tinaroo, exploring the many beautiful waterfalls including Millaa Millaa and Ellinjaa Falls, some gorgeous lakes, (our favourite being Lake Eacham) and seeing some of the local attractions such as the Curtain and Cathedral Fig Trees.

We’ve really enjoyed some of the smaller towns here too….Yungaburra was a real favourite and we saw platypus, turtles and tree kangaroos in the wild there, much to the excitement of the girls!!

We are now staying at a small town called Ravenshoe. We booked into the old railway station park for a night and have now been here a week! It’s a very quirky place and very relaxing….its good to be in one place for a while and not driving the vast distances we found ourselves driving in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The girls continue to make us laugh (and cry sometimes!!) In one of our relaxing moments when we were all engrossed in respective books/newspapers, Megan piped up : “I’ll miss you when you die Mummy!” Which she promptly followed by “but when you are old, I’ll live with you, with ALL my kids so you won’t be lonely”!! How thoughtful she is! Not sure where that one came from but it did make me chuckle and it was followed by one of her characteristic Megan super cuddles!!

Rosie, also continues to make us laugh. Being true to form, Rosie managed to get us a fish last week! She didn’t catch it, but in her usual “have-a-chat” style, when she saw a man at the campsite at Wonga Beach who had caught some large fish, she started chatting to him, telling him we haven’t caught anything on our trip, and whilst she had salmon the night before, it wasn’t as fresh as the fish he had!! He must have felt so sorry for her that he gave her the fish!! That night we had delicious red snapper which fed 6 adults and our 2 girls….yum yum!

Well, tomorrow we are heading off and will start slowly making our way down the coast. We will probably stay at Mission Beach for a few nights and then head to Mackay.

Till next time!