Just a very quick update, as I am wanting a early night.

We cycled on the highway for a bit then headed onto some backroads, through forests and what seemed to be up and down endless hills.

We saw a few Kangaroos which apart from on a golf course in Cairns is the first we have seen.

We had lunch and a dog seemed pretty interested but was not that pushy and it seemed to run about a lot then just sit in front of us. I wonder how many people thought it was our dog.

We carried on after lunch and the hills got a bit wearing, but the route was nice then it opened right up to slopes of banana fields, and a view to the sea.

We arrived at our host in Toormina were we went on a little tour around which was good, we went to a good look out point. We headed back for a kindly provided dinner before doing a bit more route planning and heading to bed.

We woke up to the sound of lorries. After sleeping at the truck stop/rest area before heading off.

After about 15kms we left the highway and headed down some quiet roads to McLean along the river Clarence. McLean was a smallish town with a lot of scottish references well two a scottish shop and a recipe for haggis handing from a lamp post.

We headed to the spar to purchase a simple lunch. Bread and english style marmalade and two apples for desert.

We pressed on along some small roads until we reached the Lawrence ferry a chain ferry across the river. It operates 24/7 apart from a bit of time I think on tuesday when it is closed for maintenance. It is a free service, we had a brief discussion on whether or not it would be worth building a bridge or not, it soon ended. The ferry operates on a cable system.

The road continued in much the same way along the river until we go to the town/city of Grafton, at first this town didn’t seem too nice, this might have been because we were under the Aldi store, in the car park. After buying dinner we headed into the town centre it was a fairly good town from the brief ride through. Generally there seem to be a lot more independent stores than in england.

We rode on to another truck/rest area were we have had our dinner.

I forgot to mention earlier in the post that yesterday rest area was so called because of the fact that slightly to the south the direction we are cying there was a house with a lot of bee keeping equipment in the garden. And on that thrilling note I am going to call it a night! We also stopped another cyclist with a magpie helmet on.

We awoke earlier than normal as we wanted to go undetected, I am pretty sure quite a few people saw us but they didn’t seem to mind.

The surfers had beaten us to it and according to reports from Cliff were already in the water at 5:30. Coffee and breakfast over the surfers was good. The sunrise was not as good as the sunset, not really sure why this was.

I forgot to say that last night we could see the lighthouse we were at earlier in the day, across the bay.

Today was fairly uneventful in terms of cycling we headed back to highway 1, Bruce has now turned into the Pacific Highway. The oversized loads have got smaller, but apart from that much is the same.

On the way we stopped of at the New Italy Museum Complex. This was a very strange place, it was free its main attraction. The cafe looked fairly good, and the gift shop was reasonable priced. The rest of the museum was just full of stuff and lots of writing.

The very brief gist of the museum was that some Italians got conned into coming to Australia well in fact New Ireland which is East of New Guinea, by a French noble man Marquis de Rays who promised good land etc etc, the boat was rubbish the land was not good, a lot of them died and in the end they made it to New Italy where we were earlier.

After the museum we cycled onto a rest stop. The rest stop called Beekeepers, I am not sure why. The rest stop is basically a layby very close to the highway but separated by a small band of trees, there is a table under a shelter and a clean but rather smelly composting loo. This single loo was used by a coach load of children coming back from a sporting event. It took quite sometime for them all to get through.

We are now cooking dinner listening to the sound of passing trucks.

We are currently at the look out names above. The land was donated by Mr and Mrs Easter and family to honour HON P.H. Morton former minister for local govt. and Highways 26 March 1977.

We had a good days cycling, and made out first real detour of the trip. This was to see Byron Bay. A lot of people told us that it was a lovely spot so we felt we should go there. My first thoughts on arrival were that all the people who recomended the trip here should have seen Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast a much nicer spot! Only jesting Byron Bay was lovely. We rode up to the lighthouse which gave us great views up and down the coast.

We had a little walk to Australia’s eastern most point, before have jam and ginger nut sandwiches, it was a waste of good ginger nuts.

After this we cycle down from the lights house, it was a good downhill section. I forgot to mention that it was hard climb up to the lighthouse.

We headed to Woolworths to get dinner. As we were packing up to leave a man said so you made it then. This was a little confusing but made sense in the end when he explained that he saw us earlier in the day. We suggest that we head to Lennox Head, and that there would be loads of rest areas with camping. We are at this look out, and it doesn’t seem like they invite campers to stay but we will hide away.

We have seen a lot of surfers today, I want to find out about the origins of surfing so would be intresting, if somebody could tell me.

We are now both sitting on a beach over looking a moon lit bay. Its good, and going to be a full moon tomorrow if you believe what a poodle walker says! The sunset was special too but impossible to describe in words.

Well I suppose we should put up our tents, it really seems like a lot of effort though, well probable best to do it.

Yesterday we had the day of in Brisbane, we drove into the city centre to drop some clothes of at our hosts work place.

We then headed to elite bikes where I brought a replacement rear tyre. I went for a Maxxis Overdrive elite, there was quite a good selection in the shop but not loads of choice for the width I wanted. I shall see how this tyre goes, hopefully it will last longer than the last one.

After this we drove some of the route we would be riding out of the city, this was useful as finding the way out of cities can be hard. We headed to the beach and got some chips before heading back to Brisbane and to our hosts house. The chips had this thing called chicken salt on them, I am not to sure what this is, it didn’t make them take all that chickeny, but they did taste fairly good.

On the drive back we picked up two pies from a drive in pie shop, steak and apricot that’s too separate pies not a steak and apricot pie, which might work.

We got home sorted a few things out and the pies were heated up as well as some lovely roasted vegetables. We had a look at some maps and route options, before heading to bed.

It was a good day and we got to chat a lot with our hosts which was good.

After our day off it was time for an early start. We followed the good direction of the V1 cycle route our of Brisbane to the coast it was a good route and well signed. There were a lot of road cyclist that over took us on the way, they were all friendly and said their hellos it was good.

We cover the distance to the coast fairly quickly and got to Surfer Paradise in time for lunch, on the beach. The city was fairly built up with a lot of high rises, that put the beech into shade fairly early on in the day. It seemed like a very expensive fashion town, seemed a little out of place in our cycling gear and with our bikes.

After a fairly long lunch we headed on to Coolengatta, where we met our hosts. They had done a lot of cycle touring all over the world and it was very interesting to chat to them, they had some good ideas about america. We had a good dinner before preparing our route down to Sydney only about 900kms to go!

I fear this blog may not make much sense as I am fairly tired and we have been doing lots of route planing on lots of different maps that we have collected.

It was a little warmer last night so we headed of past Steve Irwin’s Australian Zoo, and the Glass House Mountains, name by Cook around 1770, as they look like the furnaces from his native Yorkshire (wikipedia facts).

It was a good days riding on lots of different roads, nice and varied, which I find helps the kms pass. A bit of the day was spent on Oakley Flat Road it was not flat.

We had lunch in Strathpine, on the roof of the Westfield shopping centre. My lunch stop choice and a rather good one if I may say so myself. No sand in the sandwiches today.

Strathpine was really the start of the outskirts of Brisbane, from here we headed into the city centre crossing over the river, the Brisbane river on the Story Bridge, this was an impressive structure, opened in 1940, the only facts I have about the bridge are from Wikipedia so if you would like you can read about it there.

Soon after crossing the bridge we saw another cyclist who stopped and chatted with us for a bit. He was asking a lot of questions about equipment etc which was good. At this point we also emailed our host found on warm showers let them know our estimate time of arrival. We headed to the suburb, were they lived and arrived in good time around 4pm, it was a good days cycling and I feel that I am really getting used to the bike. It feels stable despite all the weigh.

Our host kindly cooked us a lovely lasagne which was very tasty and we spend the evening talking.

Tomorrow we are having the day off. It’s nice to have a warm shower once in a while.

After a night camping in an overflow car park we awoke to very damp tents due to mist and dew.

We quickly took down our tents and headed to the park to cook breakfast hot muesli and coffee and dry out or stuff.

We hit the road, for some strange reason we seemed to think that it might be possible to cycle on the sunshine motorway, alas we couldn’t so we went on a few gravel roads and winded our way along.

After a while we hit a coastal road apart from the ups this was good. We saw people surfing, and jumping fish why do they jump? We also stocked up at Aldi, it was not as cheap as we were hoping but not too bad. I suggested lunch in Aldi car park but Cliff thought the beach would be nicer, I saw sense and headed to the beech. It was a good lunch spot, but it was hard to get the bikes out of the sand and over a little dune.

We headed on past a lot of shops that seemed to sell anything you could need, ever. The shops just seemed to line the roads for miles and miles.

We stopped at a rest stop thinking about staying there but it was fairly parked up with what seemed to be commuters. The toilets were also portaloo and not to nice.

We headed on to the rest stop in Landsborough which was much nicer. I am now enjoying a nice cup of after dinner tea before heading to bed.

This morning there were a lot of chatty campers. 1. A man with a 44 second world war army jeep who was camping with his swag, this seemed to be a big bag he slept in. 2. A man who had a caravan who also had a trucking business with 10 trucks. He was telling us about the high paying job opportunities in the west. Said they paid very well $4,000 a week, I think these were jobs in mines. He was going to do some metal detecting. 3. A man originally from Finland who had spent most of his life in Australia. He travelled around selling things at markets.

It was good to talk to these people, but they did seem very chatty and it did delay us a little but not to much.

As the road we are on turns into a motorway we have turned off the Bruce Highway.

A few kms before turning off I got our first puncture a goodbye present from the highway. It didn’t take too long to fix it, but my rear tyre is not looking that good, it has warn a lot and the rubber is coming away from the part under the rubber. I might look into getting a new tyre in Brisbane.

It was good getting off the highway and heading onto some quite back roads, some leading passed some nice residential housing. There were good views over the hills and mountains.

We cycled on to Eumundi which is a craft market historic town. It seems to be a strange place. They put knitting around the trees. But it has a nice feel to it.

We met a performing artist who chatted and told us a lot about the town and the surrounding area.

We saw a train PN005 today we have seen this one already it was good to see the train again as it had been a few days since we had seen one.

Its getting late so best to bed.

Oh I forgot to mention the ‘Golden Gaytime’ it was probably the coldest it has been on the trip so far so we decided to by an Ice Cream called ‘Golden Gaytime’ we got one each from a very small petrol station that didn’t seem to have any lights on at all it was very dark. Its hard to describe the ice cream, so you will just have to guess what it is like, for maybe google it.

Today we awoke to a bit of rain but the sky promised better things.

We packed away our wild camp and headed on to Maryborough, this was a bit off the highway and the winds and hills were increasing but the sun was out that meant we could dry out a bit.

In Maryborough we headed to the supermarket Foodworks. We went to fill up the petrol for the stove at a BP garage but the man was very insistent that we couldn’t and that he would turn off the pumps if we tried. A colleague of his looked at the container and said that it would probably be okay but that he would prefer it if we didn’t fill up, so we headed on and found the Ned Kelly filling station they were fine with the container, just a little confused at the 85 cents it cost to fill up. Its not very big and petrol is not very expensive.

We headed on brought a roadside avocado for lunch eaten in a nice park behind the tourist information in Tiaro We headed on to our rest stop, passing through some lovely scenery. The landscape seemed to open up more giving some good views. We had a woodfired BBQ to cook some kangaroo steaks which tasted pretty much like normal steaks, but were good.

I am now sitting down, with a nice cup of tea and probable the best Gingernuts in the world. They are the cheapest ones from Woolworths but they are perfect not too hard not too soft and with a touch of cinnamon which is a pleasant surprise, in each bite I cannot recommend them more.

Its getting colder so its bed time.

When it rains it pours, I think that’s something people say. Today it we were woken by the rain. Very heavy rain fall.

We quickly packed our stuff into our waterproof bags, and rushed over to the shelter, that was conveniently close to where we camped. We got into all our waterproof gear and after a bit of wishing we didn’t have to left.

Despite the rain the cycling went fairly well and we seemed to have an average speed of 40kmph. Cliff cycle computer did not confirm this, I think might have got a little wet.

We stop in Childers for a supermarket shop, Kanga Bangers for dinner tonight. A strange couple started talking to me, asking what we were going to do with the bikes when we got to Sydney. They thought it would be cheaper to chuck them away and buy new ones in Japan rather than fly over with them. They have either been stung by excess baggage charges before, or don’t know how much we spent on our bikes.

We bumped into a couple of cycle tourers who were just starting out on a world tour, they looked happy despite the rain, we also passed another who didn’t look so happy.

After Childers which seemed like a nice town with a fair bit going on we cycled on. As there were no rest areas placed within cycling distance we have chosen to wild camp outside a small village maybe town we haven’t been there yet so who knows, but it is called Howard.

I haven’t mentioned the stars here at all but when your out of the town they are lots of them and they are pretty bright, you can normally see the milky way.

Well these Kanga Bangers won’t cook and eat themselves.