Cairns to Townsville

What a lovely chilled day. We had a bit of lie in and had our free pancakes for breakfast at our hostel in Cairns then got packed up and left. We are getting good at packing up quickly, can do it all in about 15-20 minutes now. We have organised everything into these "packing cubes", we each have two, one for tops and one for bottoms and a ziplock bag for underwear (clean obviously!) and then we have extra cubes for the electric cables, first aid etc, toiletries, and swimming stuff, so we just need to take our our cubes, pick our clothes and slide the 2 back in the backpacks, no rummaging around pulling everything out to find what you want, it also stops most things from creasing too. Anyway, I digress... I don't think any of us were particularly sad to leave Cairns, it just didn't do much for us but the hostel was set up nicely with great outdoor space.

Our trip today was approx 350-400km, we decided to stop at either Mission Beach or Cardwell, both were the only bigger places roughly half way. On a whim we decided to go for Mission Beach as all the signs, loads and loads of them, promised the opportunity to see Cassowaries wild...needless to say we didn't see any but oh my, the beach was just out of this world. It is 37km long, we were at the north end, just randomly chose it and pulled up on quite a sleepy street and followed a little sign pinned onto a house saying beach access...as we walked through the alley we were all gobsmacked, we pretty much had the entire thing to ourselves as far as the eye could see.

Palm trees, light golden sand and turquoise water for miles, the photos really don't do it enough justice. We were so glad we didn't wait for Cardwell, as it wasn't a patch on mission beach, and the water looked kinda grey when we drove through it on the highway later.

The ultimate cheese and pickle sandwich :-)

We laid out our picnic stuff we had gotten at the supermarket in Cairns and enjoyed! J and Adam still had cheese and pickle sandwiches though haha! We enjoyed the peace for sometime but, then moved up to a netted area as we wanted to swim, and you can only swim at the beaches in Queensland in these guarded, netted off areas, due to nasty jelly fish. This meant we had to share our peaceful space with a few others, but the sea was lovely, just like a hot bath in the shallowest bits

Great barrier reef meets tropical rainforest

We then stopped at Tully, officially the wettest town in Australia, so much so, that the residents built a statue of a welly boot, 7.9m tall representing the amount of annual rainfall they had in their wettest year on record!! It was a bit random really but you could climb inside it and the kids thought it was amusing.

We also stopped at this lookout point where you could see where the Great Barrier Reef meets the Northern Queensland rain forests, this combination makes it completely unique in its fauna and flora due to the combination of salt and fresh water in the mangroves and the temperature of the ground and water.

Ice cream at the "frosty mango"

Our last stop of the trip was the much anticipated Frosty Mango shop. There are ice cream flavours to die for and every ingredient used to flavour them is grown on the 300 acre estate behind the shop, from the mint and cocoa beans to the passion fruit, and obviously the mangos. The ice cream was amazing!! And the orchards were too....huge hot pink dragon fruits, macadamias and jack fruits dripping off the trees. This area generally is known for its tropical fruit and sugar cane growing though...Freya is in watermelon heaven!!

We had a bit of difficulty finding our Motel, the Historic Yongala Lodge, tonight, but got there in the end, a 2 bed apartment this time..sheer luxury in terms of space! It also happened to be 50m from the seafront splash park..most of the bigger towns seem to have one of these, so, as is our habit, it seems, we ended up there at 7pm for a quick pre-dinner play in the dark :-)