8th November 2011
To celebrate the birthday of the world’s best mum (Barry’s) we drove into Townsville to the visitor centre which totally fooled our Navman as it has moved. However, we parked outside the Museum and walked to the new visitor centre whilst taking photos in the surrounding vicinity of some of the old buildings. We also had a bought lunch whilst there and walked back to look over the museum. This visit was cut short with a phone call to let us know that Foxy had escaped, found a convenient human in the caravan park and jumped up on his lap. Fortunately her ID disc has our phone number on it, which is how he knew who to phone. The park is very poorly designed, and our bay in particular has a fire hydrant with a concrete base right at the end of our concrete pad which stops us pegging the annex wall down to the ground. This allowed our little troublemaker to get out underneath the wall, but we have now made modifications that should stop her little game. Originally we were going to stop at a park 20kms south of Townville that claims to be quiet and peaceful but we decided to cut out the journeys back and forth and opted for the one near town. This was a mistake as it looks nice from the outside but is badly designed making it diabolical to get the van into the allotted bay. Having eventually managed that without damage we found the pad is way too long to be able to put both front and back annex walls up as you can’t peg down the front wall down on the concrete. We then found out that we couldn’t peg the back one down either, hence our little problem. Add to that the fact that we had no idea that it is close to the domestic airfield plus a military airfield, a railway and a truck route, so it rather noisy. There are domestic flights coming and going along with fly in/out mining flights and numerous military helicopters doing their manoeuvres during the day and evening. On the brighter side, it is marginally cooler and not quite so humid. From what we have seen of Townsville has assured us that we have no desire to live here but that also applies to all other cities and large towns. After living in the Pilbara for about 16 years even Geraldton will feel too big by the time we get back to it. The problem will be finding somewhere that suits both of us and is still in touch with a decent shopping centre, medical assistance and suitable weather conditions.
10th November
The bulk of the day was used for organising the next few weeks and juggling photos between our several external hard drives in the theory that this keeps our computer hard drives relatively free from photos, and if any of the external ones die we still have back-up.
After dinner we drove into Townsville and up the steep winding road to the summit of Castle Hill that offers great views across the city both da and night, and will be doing it again in daylight. There are six lookouts around the top of the hill to allow views in all directions and heights, and apparently plenty of unofficial lookouts, as we saw several idiots climbing back over the handrails after checking out the sheer drop. Townsville is the second largest town in Queensland and as the views from the hill prove, it stretches a long way. It was quite windy up there which actually made the night photography not-so-good as our tripods aren’t the most substantial units and allowed movement in some cases.
About mid-morning we drove through to The Strand which is the Townsville beach area that has a regular swimming pool at one end and a couple of kilometres of well kept beach stretching out from it. There is an attractive walkway along the length of this beach area with numerous kids’ play areas and surprisingly allowed dogs on leads so Foxy got to enjoy herself, and had free parking. It was a very warm, humid day so after returning for lunch we stayed home and watched the Australian open golf tournament during the afternoon. 12th November 2011
We drove up castle hill again in daylight to see what we were actually looking at on our night time visit and found that it was still quite breezy at this altitude. Whilst the views from the top are great they don't match up to the views from Mt Wellington overlooking Hobart. We visited most but not all of the lookouts that we visited during our night time trip and despite the breeze were able to get some good photos thanks to daylight and faster shutter speeds. 
After our descent we visited Queens Gardens, which also allowed dogs on leads, and spent an hour walking through the compact, but lovely, gardens. We watched the golf again in the afternoon but did go out for some shopping at a large shopping complex with almost impossible parking arrangements.13th November 2011
We drove through town to the Botanic Gardens which you can drive through which was just as well as had nothing other than a Lilly filled lake to hold your interest so a few photos later we moved on to the Palmetum (botanic garden) which was totally different to the usual botanic garden, but still not as pleasant to walk around as Queens Gardens. It has numerous segregated areas for different nationality species including a rainforest complete with bats. e then weaved our way through an upmarket estate along the Ross River to the Rivers Bend Lookout which is nicely presented and overlooks over a weir which at this point of time has no water flowing over it.
We then drove to the ‘Jupiters’ casino and into the end of The Strand that we didn’t explore a couple of days ago.
There is a regular outdoor swimming pool that doesn’t appear to get much use and on one side is a kids’ water playground that is fully utilised and on the other side is the war memorial.
On the other side of the road is small cliff with a hotel/resort/ fancy house on the top with a waterfall down the cliff face to a pond at the bottom. There is a pump house alongside the pool so we assume the water is pumped back up and probably through the swimming pool attached to the property. It is very effective, and unexpected, at the side of the road in a town. We then headed home to watch the last day’s golf on the TV as the days is getting hot and humid again. In the evening we treated ourselves to dinner at the local ‘Sizzlers’ which wasn’t too busy when we arrived but it soon filled out. We were lucky as they placed us in a room separate to the main dining room which kept us away from the screaming kids so that we could enjoy the experience, which we did until we tried their disgusting coffee, so we left that and went home for some drinkable coffee. We packed up and moved on to Bowan where we stopped overnight on our way to Jeane and Marks place in Sarina (south of Mackay) were we stayed before. On arrival at the Bowan caravan park that we used last time there was no-one in the office so we retreated to one just up the road which was good from the noise point of view as we were a fair way from the road with no-one else around. We were almost on the salt flats with no shade so we wouldn’t want to stay more than overnight.
15th November 2011
We continued on our way to Sarina and arrived at Mark and Jeane’s just after lunch. They have made a lot of changes to the surrounds round the house, and as expected, the modification that was made to the gate to let us get the van out last time made it very easy to get into the garden area this time.
16th November 2011
We settled in at Jeane and Marks and did very little other than take Foxy for a walk along Armstrong Beach in the afternoon.
17th November 2011
We took the Patrol to Mackay for its 110,000kms service and as it was a fairly hot day and we walk the town last time we were here we stopped off for a coffee at a cafe whilst we waited for the cinema to open. Half an hour later we left and went to the cinema to watch a film called ‘Eye of the storm’ which is a 2 hour film, but we walked out half way through because it was a load of boring rubbish. We decided to look for somewhere to have lunch and realised that we had left the morning cafe without paying for the coffees, so we went there to make amends but their computer system had nothing outstanding for that table. It brought up our order as paid so either someone else paid it, or their system is not so good. Either way it didn’t cost us anything so we stopped for lunch which we paid for this time. We them walked along to the Nissan Service centre which coincided perfectly with the car being ready and proceeded to Caneland Central (the largest Mackay shopping centre) as Merry had a few requirements needed for her wardrobe, and then headed back to Sarina.
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