The Big Lap - Gympie to Rockhampton

Firstly, I need to apologise to anyone reading via Feedly. I'm posting using the Blogger App and it won't let me type a complete title and then keeps closing halfway through a post. I'm saving a draft after every sentence, which is a little frustrating. After publishing my post I have to go into my blog post and do a quick edit to add a few little bits, which creates a duplicate.  Sorry for cluttering things up.   Now to today....

Yesterday I forgot to show you an example of the woodcarvings that are right through the caravan park at Gympie. They are rather clever. 

We woke up to a grey day and even had a few spots of rain while packing up. Despite riding along wet road on quite a few occasions, we were blessed with fine weather wherever we were. The morning had a minimum of 14 and it quickly reached the mid 20s, which was rather pleasant. 

Morning tea was at Gin Gin, which is really well geared up for travellers with a nice park in the middle of the Main Street.

We travelled through large areas of sugar cane, but didn't see any cane trains as yet. 

A bonus was catching up with some Bathurst friends who are on holidays up this way. It is funny how we happen to run into them when we are both travelling. Nice to see a familiar face from home. 

We were intrigued by the trivia questions on the side of the road in Fatigue Zones. 

Some, like this one were fairly easy, but some were tricky. What is the name of a group of toads?  Did you know that it is a Knot?  Well, we do now.

We enjoy playing Spotto as we ride along. It isn't something I played as a kid, but Mick's family did. BP service stations used to have cards for the kids which had a list of things that they had to spot as they travelled. Mick and I have our standard list which includes windmill, dog in the back of a ute, yellow car and an emu.   We the add as we go along and depending on where we go. This time we've looked for a Mustang, a kombi van, a big thing on the back of a truck, a vehicle on historic plates, dairy cows and more that I can't think of just now. 

We are still looking for an emu, bottle tree, boat tree, came, goanna, cane train and snake. I'm hoping we don't see the latter. 

We had lunch at a nice rest area beside the Boyne River near Gladstone.  I had relatives near Mundubbera whose property adjoined this River and we had a few holidays there when I was a kid, so I've swum in this River several times. 

Anyway, there were heaps of caravans at the rest area free camping. Today we have seen several such spots, all well used. With so many caravans being self sufficient you can see why they are popular, as they have been lovely spots. 

Finally, we arrived at Rockhampton. We will be staying here for a couple of nights, playing the tourist, as we have good motorcycling friends here.  We first met going to Tassie in 2006 and always enjoy catching up with them.