Suzanne & Nic Outback Caravan Trip 2025

 21st July 2026:Still raining  intermittently but we decided to walk to the Kinaba Visitor Information Centre- a 12 km return walk. It was a lovely walk initially through blue gums and cabbage palms which quite abruptly gave way to melaleucas-paperbarks. I heard birds overhead loudly calling- some definitely sounding like a whip! ? A whip bird? They remained elusive except for a red browed finch and a rufous fantail. We finally reached the Visitor information centre on the shore of Lake Cootharaba near the entrance of the Noosa River, a mangrove swamp with tea tre  stained dark brown water. There were some interesting posters displayed - see one of the time line of sand dune progression. The visitors centre was full of Students from St Paul’s school in Hong Kong who had just kayaked there from Elanda point where we started from. We did a side boardwalk over the mangroves to see many waterlines, and another walk to the shore of the Lake. We then returned home with an extra...

 20th July 2026: Awoke to a fiercely blowing wind supposedly around 60km/hour and an almost empty campsite! All the vans and tents along the shore were gone, all tents elsewhere had packed up, and only a few vans and mobile homes remained. Lake Cootharaba was brown a long way out with lots of white capped waves. Those two tour boats continued to twist in circles on their moorings. We decided to go into Noosa to pick up some groceries after a coffee and snack. We drove around Noosa, vastly increased in size since our last visit and we went up and down Hastings Street- very busy and full of “beautiful people”. We drove along the right hand edge of the main beach until the entrance to the National Park. We returned to the Eco Retreat and booked an Everglades boat trip for us and Pip and Rosie on Thursday when the weather is supposed to be calmer. I finished reading Elizabeth Strout’s book “The things we never say”. I cooked Vegie pasta sauce on the induction cooktop inside the van for...

 19th July 2026: awoke to wind and rain and cold! We both have colds so we’re not inclined to move far from our cosy caravan. The wind was so strong that even the ducks surrounding our caravan squatted down with their heads and beaks folded into their feathers! We made coffee and then I made us some pikelets inside on the induction hot plate to cheer us up!  I ventured down to the waters edge, only to see white caps on a brown sea with the 2 Everglades tourist boats being turned around and around in a circle on their moorings by the wind! Many of the parks occupants have deserted ship, especially those in tents!  We spent the day reading, cosy in our van. I cooked us a vegetable omelette inside on the induction hot plate, followed by a custard apple. We still feel very moved over San Neill’s death, so we watched “Death in Brunswick” on iview in the evening. 

 18th July 2026: We packed up at Maroochydore and managed to negotiate our caravan past the horizontally placed garden bed across the entrance to our site! We did this by Nic’s clever use of our Optitec caravan mover, used for the first time! If the same sized garden bed  was placed at right angles to the current bed running between the caravan sites they would save their caravan owner clients a great deal of angst! We headed for the Maroochydore Bush Botanic Garden, towards Palmwood. Unfortunately their coffee shop is closed on Friday Saturday and Sunday! However we enjoyed a walk through their sculpture garden, with sculptures hewn out of local sandstone and Chilligoe black and white marble by a variety of local and international sculptors got together to create a marvellous display of works, apparently worked on in situ by the artists concerned so that the public could watch the creative process in action. We then proceeded to go to our next destination-Habitat Everglades E...