The Ellis Oz Blog: A site for sore eyes

The boys trying to open a coconut

After a big day of driving through bad weather, we arrived about 20ks out of Mackay and were planning on staying at a little rest area outside of a hotel. But when we got there we decided against staying. It was a dirty little car park behind a dirty little pub. There was broken glass and mud everywhere and it looked as though it was the local hang out and drinking area. They have had a lot of rain recently so the area to camp in was at least two inches under water.

Zaccy playing cars in the sand

We went to call some caravan parks to try to get into one, only to find we had no phone service. W need phone service for Dan to contact his clients so we had no choice but to move.

On the way into town I was calling all the caravan parks to see if they had vacancies. Not only were they all full but most of them didn’t allow dog to stay. We are travelling with Marvel, our Labrador so we needed a dog friendly park.

We finally found a vacancy at a little caravan park north of Mackay in a town called Bucasia. They only had one site left because the power box to that site was not working. We have solar power so we didn’t mind. By this time it was getting late and we were getting a bit desperate.

We were really lucky because the site was beautiful and backed right onto the beach. We just had to walk a few metres under the coconut palms and we came out on a beautiful, almost deserted beach.

The view from our caravan. It was magical!

We had the beach to ourselves - it was too cold for the locals!

Sam took Marv for a run on the beach every day.

We were told that there are crocodiles in the river on the other side of the caravan park, but the beach was ok to paddle in. I was nervous about the crocs and very worried about Marvel getting taken. After walking along the beach and making sure I couldn’t see any trace of crocs we went for a paddle and had a lovely time. From then on we spent a lot of time at the beach and Sam took Marvel for a run along the water’s edge every day.

There are a lot of families staying in Bucasia beach and the kids quickly made friends. They all did their school by distance education in the morning, then played on the beach and built cubbies under the palm trees in the afternoon.

We spent an afternoon in town at the Lagoon. Unfortunately the waterslide was closed but he kids still had a wonderful time cooling off in the pools.

Zac was so excited he went in fully clothed!

We drove out to Eungella one afternoon to try to see the elusive platypus at Finch Hatton Gorge but when we got there the rain had set in. It became so cloudy that we could hardly see the road in front of us let alone anything in the river!

Crossing a causeway in the National Park

We drove up to the top of Mount Eungella but once again we were in cloud so didn’t have a good view. It was beautiful coming back down through the clouds though.

We stopped off at the Pinnacle Pub to try their world famous pies on the way home. We were sitting waiting for our dinner to arrive when we thought we heard a familiar voice. There was a guy at the bar that sounded exactly like a really good friend back home, Nathan. It was hilarious to listen to this guy and it got us talking about home.

We really miss all our family and friends but we are just not ready to go back yet. We are travelling around Australia really slowly so that we can see as much as possible, but we are not even half way yet. There is still so much more to explore!