NORTH QLD ADVENTURE - DAY 29 - TOWNSVILLE TO BOWEN.

We head off again this morning, further south and closer to home.  Today we are heading to Bowen for a couple of nights.

 We got away around 9.30am and we have another couple of hundred kilometres to travel today.  We didn’t stop at all today arriving in at Bowen just after noon.

 We are booked into “Wangaratta by the Beach” Caravan Park which is pretty much located on    Queen’s Beach in Bowen. 

 We are very happy with the park and our location in it.  We are just across from the pool which is absolutely beautiful and quite large.  Large enough to swim laps if needed.  It is located next to the laundry and camp kitchen which overlook the golf course and the beach so the views are lovely.  We are located across from the toilets and showers.  In some ways I wish we were staying a little longer than two nights.

 

The first thing I did when we arrived was to throw in a load of washing… With the heat, we are needing to wash more regularly.  We had lunch and then had a nap as we were feeling pretty buggered from the previous couple of days.  We had spent two very long days out in the sun and it had totally zapped our energy.

 We woke around 4pm and then headed to the pool for a dip.  It was quite popular with quite a few people coming and going.  We met a lovely British couple who came to Australia in January for 20 days and has been stranded here ever since, well  probably not really stranded but they certainly don’t want to head back to Britian at the moment with COVID cases a lot worse than they are a in Australia.  They figured that if you had to get locked down in the world, this is the best country for it to happen in. 

 They have still managed somehow to visit most states in Australia in their time here.

After our swim and shower, we decided to head into Bowen as Steve wanted to pick up some milk.  It was just before sunset when we took off and on our way into town, we took a detour up to Flagstaff Hill to watch the sunset.  We arrived up there just as the sun was setting…

 I was thrown a little by our visit up here as last time we were here, there was a beautiful building and café up here, or at least I thought there had been.   It was missing this time, so I was keen to go back and check my photos to see if my mind was playing tricks o me.

From here we drove into Bowen itself but everything was closed, we couldn’t find an open shop anywhere.  By now it was after 7pm and Steve really didn’t feel like coming home and cooking dinner, so we noticed the Pizza Hut was opened and serving pizzas so he decided to order a bacon and Chicken pizza for us for dinner instead.  He also ordered some chicken wings as an entre also.  We had some when we went out for dinner with Fay and Chris in Townsville and they were really crispy and delicious.  He enjoyed them so much that he thought we might relive that experience.  These ones, although tasty didn’t come up to scratch when compared to the ones we got in Townsville.

It was going on for 8pm by the time we arrived back at the van to eat our dinner…  After dinner, I checked my computer to see if I could find the photos we took when we were last in Bowen and found the photos of the buildings that were up at Flagstaff Hill.  I was correct there had been a building up there.  Next I needed to find out what had happened to that building to satisfy my curiosity.   It turns out that  a new big development and conference centre has been planned for up there and the old building has been demolished to make way for the building of the new centre.  The old building was demolished exactly a year ago, and the tenders are out now for the building of the new building.  Hopefully next time we come, we will see a new building up there.

As we had, had a nap this afternoon, we were not quite ready for bed, so I edited photos to try and catch up on the backlog after two huge days our sight seeing, whilst Steve was deleting work emails and saving what he wanted to save before loosing access to his work email account as by the end of this week he will possibly no longer have access to it.

It was close to midnight before we finally got to bed.