Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in
Australia and New Zealand
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Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in Australia and New Zealand |
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April 13 - Rockhampton to Burnett Heads, Queensland 392 km (243 Miles) |
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Today was an unplanned day, just to wander and look around. We started by riding down the coast on Highway 1, and with some advice from a local man, we went out to the coast to the "Town of 1770". We thought this had some special attachment to the year 1770, and it did somewhat, but not much. The special attachment was that Captain James Cook dropped anchor in this inlet on May 24, 1770, as he was mapping the coastline of Australia. But there was no special plaque, or museum or anything, just a little beach area with some nice beach and some mud beach.
The little associated tourist town didn't offer much, except a shack restaurant with "Peppered Kangaroo Hamburgers" for $15.50 - no thanks - we passed. All in all, it was kind of a disappointment. We continued toward the town of Bundaberg, having been told by one of our friends that there was an interesting distillery of rum there that offered tours through its facilities. The reason for a rum distillery here has ties into the sugar cane, by way of the sugar that is used in the distillation process. Unfortunately we were 15 minutes late for the final tour of the day, so that didn't work out. By the way, we went through more sugar cane fields again today - another 25-35 miles worth! In a couple of places there were warning road signs that said to the effect "Watch out for cane hauling trucks, May-December". At least now we know when harvest time is. It seems that many thousands of truckloads are needed to get the cane transported. - There are tens of thousands of acres of cane, as we said before. Then with more wandering, we found a little crossroads store, motel, restaurant, and bakery, and decided to spend the night there. We don't know exactly where we are, but it's fun to be lost sometimes. It turned out that Friday is the good day to be here, in that the restaurant has what turned out to be an excellent buffet dinner. So our early disappointments had a happy ending. Tomorrow is the last day to have the bikes before turning them back to the rental company, "Aussie Biker", so we will just do some more wandering on our way back to the bike barn. |
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