After a week out in the sticks at Baffle Creek we were ready to move on to our next destination. This was Yeppoon 330km further north. We had enjoyed ourselves in Baffle Creek, walking along deserted beaches and living in a quiet caravan park. The beaches were cluttered with trees from the recent cyclone. This had also eaten away at the dunes and caused substantial erosion in some places.
We left for Rockhampton in the early morning and headed north along the Bruce Highway (A1). Rather disappointingly the road was in very poor condition at times. There were ruts in many places for kilometers at a time where the years of heavy loads had squashed the road surface to create humps in the bitumen which made it look like a track. That is very disappointing for a state freeway.
The way it affected me is that my truck would sway from side to side and the caravan would do its own thing and sway in a different beat. This created some tricky driving. I had to wrestle the rig many times to make sure it did not wander onto the wrong side of the road. I was pretty much exhausted by the time we got to Yeppoon.
The way it affected Dawn was that there were many loud screeches of panic as she reached for the ‘Jesus’ bar and of course there is no such thing in the Navara. The “Jesus’ bar was a large handle on the passenger side of the dashboard of the Nissan Patrol. People could hold on to this as they got into or out of the vehicle. It was used mainly by frightened passengers to hold onto as the vehicle bounced around rocky mountain peaks whilst 4wdriving.
Rockhampton is a town of more than 85000 people and is well laid out. It’s a pretty place and I look forward to exploring it in the next week. We continued on to Yeppoon which was only 36 km away. I was glad to book into our caravan park and get organized with setting up every thing. I look forward to a relaxing few weeks here at the Capricorn coast.
