Mackay to Airlie Beach

It was a moving on day today.

Up and about at a reasonable hour and after breakfast it was packing up the Karavan. After we had almost finished packing up, we had a nice cappuccino made by Drew. Then it was time to move on.

At the entrance to Whitsunday Gold Coffee

We wound our way through the streets from where Drew and Angie live until we finally arrived onto the Bruce Highway once again. We turned in a northerly direction. As we left Mackay it very quickly went from a very busy city back into rural scenery. However the Bruce Highway was very busy in both directions. This was also the final weekend of the Queensland school holidays.

Whitsunday Gold

We had several short stops on the way, which was only about 160 kilometres in total. On such stop was at the Whitsunday Gold Coffee. We had another coffee here obviously made from the local product. It was quite a nice flavour.

Our next short drive was to the BIG4 Adventure Whitsunday Resort. I stayed here last year and was impressed by the layout and cleanliness of the whole place. We set up very quickly and Prue managed to get a massage from an on site therapist.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up by relaxing as in the evening we were going to watch the Super Rugby Final. We had only a short walk to the Reef Gateway Hotel where we had a nice dinner prior to the Rugby game between the Queensland Reds and the Canterbury Crusaders from New Zealand,.

There was a large crowd in the hotel to watch the Rugby on numerous television sets around the building. By the noise when points were scored there were also New Zealand supporters there too. A tough and relatively low scoring game that could have been won by either team but the Reds were the victors scoring 2 tries to 1. We are going to be in for some great international rugby in coming months if that game was an indication.