Daniel and Marysia around Australia: Cairns, Far North Tropical Queensland.

Paying for carparking in Cairns

We arrived in Cairns to catch up with Les and Stew at our nominated caravan park. It was here that we were to plan our road trip (without our vans) up through the Cape York Peninsula.
The last time we saw each other on the road was 5 months ago but we managed to keep in touch by mobile, or emails so we had a great couple of nights catching up on all our road travels and awesome adventures. We had more than our few shares of red and white wines as we exchanged our stories whilst preparing for the next leg of our shared journey.

By the lagoon in central Cairns

The best of the story so far had to be Stew's trip to Bunnings in Cairns. We're all doing our
last bits of shopping for the trip. Stew heads into Bunnings for some timber to add to his car.
On his return he sees smoke coming from the back of his Ute. Taking a corner the battery in the back fell over and moved across to the butane gas bottles. Whilst he was buying his timber a rag catches fire with flames pouring out of the back Stew tells an Bunnings employee to get a
fire extinguisher. Luckily for Stew he put the flames out by himself but we were all laughing
madly because it could easily have exploded, his new car, the timber yard at Bunnings, 100 people out of a job and Stew going nowhere near Cape York! Somebody up there really must love him!

Marysia....just take one more step back!!!!!

The plan was to spend about 3 weeks on this journey, arriving at the tip, Cape York, before heading back down to collect the vans where we'd left them at Mt Carbine (with free storage!).
It was a nice place and we strolled down to the local pub for a pre-dinner drink before heading back to base for dinner with our planned roll out the next morning.

Vans unhooked, placed in storage, bikes attached to vans, hitches taken off the cars, side boards taken off our vehicle. Cars packed to the max with camping gear, tents, stockpile of food. You'd think we were going to 'Never Never' land with the amount of stuff that was piled into the cars!

Final inspections done on vehicles we were ready to roll out for the first leg of the journey.

Another shot of the lagoon

Our first stop for a 'wee' break was at the Hann Road house where we stretched our legs having
a strong coffee before getting back on the road. That afternoon we arrived at the first night's
stop at Musgrave Road house. A great stop where many more adventurous souls were heading up the same way or returning from the done trip. Tents pitched for the night, dinner and music supplied we hit the sack for tomorrow's journey onto Iron Range National Park to stay at Chilli Beach.