Barb & John's Hols: Lap around Australia Maleny to Gracemere

And we're off!.....

After a delay of ten days post our recent UK trip due to John's dental implant we are finally off! Yay.
We were packed up, hitched and ready to leave as soon as he got back from his appointment so we waved goodbye to our lovely house and garden in Maleny leaving it in the very good care of our tenant Emma.

Bye Bye Maleny

We drive away from home

We had a very good run all the way through to our first fuel up at the Puma just outside Maryborough. It's a very pleasant place to stop and have lunch and we were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.

A pleasant place to stop for lunch near Maryborough

Pretty decent pies too!

Not long after we got underway again we started to notice that the Jackaroo was stuttering and having trouble going up even slight inclines. Uh oh! The probably became worse the further we drove and we were 5 km from Collosseum creek when the "Check engine" light came on. We limped into the servo at Collosseum creek and the nice lady at reception gave us a site for the night and called the mechanic at Miriamvale for us.

Collosseum Creek Motel & servo

First night camping on our trip

A lovely spot apart from the traffic noise of the Bruce Highway

Off course it turned out that the main mechanic was off on holidays himself, so the next morning we managed to get ourselves into Miriamvale to TCM Mechanical where Cody (one of the young lads who worked there) changed the fuel filter for us. He thought perhaps it was dirty fuel causing the problem.

Cody changes the fuel filter

We got underway again and drove along happily, stopping in the park at Mt Larcom for lunch. John noticed that some cables to the Anderson plug had been dragging on the ground and had worn through, so a quick repair job on the roadside fixed that.

Lunch at Mt Larcom

Fixing the cables

We got as far as Westwood (about 45 km west of Rockhampton) when the car began to stutter again and on came the "Check Engine" light again. We pulled over into a truck & car stopping bay just short of the Westwood pub and called RACQ. Then it was a long tiresome hour and a half wait for help to arrive. During this time the local police pulled over to check if we were okay, which we were. We could at least make a cup of tea.

Broken down outside Westwood....not happy Jan!

John waits patiently for the RACQ

Finally Brendan from BP Gracemere, who does the RACQ breakdown work arrived. He looked at the fuel filter, and it was clean, so he advised us to drive back to Gracemere where he could put the testing machines on it to diagnose the problem. Turns out that the fuel pump wasn't working properly and we needed a new one. Being late on Friday afternoon, this couldn't be done until Monday morning. Oh no!

Brendan comes to our rescue

Luckily we were able to get a site at Gracemere Caravan Park, and stay three nights. It was really rather a lovely place to stay. The garden setting was absolutely beautiful with lots of birdlife and grassy sites. The amenities block was a little old and tired, but spotlessly clean. The camp kitchen was amazing and all our fellow travellers were really nice and friendly. I guess if you had to get stuck somewhere then this wasn't too bad a place to be.

Barb's happy again at Gracemere caravan park

Nice gardens at the caravan park

We let Karen and Steve know we'd be even further delayed. They'd had their own delays due to technical issues with their fridge that had to be sorted out in Emerald, so they pressed ahead slowly without us once that was fixed.
While we were in Rockhampton we used the time to visit Bunnings and do some grocery shopping and visit the Rockhampton Botanical gardens to enjoy a chocolate malted milkshake under the old fig trees. We watched the football at night and enjoyed Happy Hour with new friends. It turned out to be a pleasant interlude.