Station break

While I get some quality time with my family for the rest of the summer, I think I'm going to take a little break from the blogging. There are already onward adventures in the works and certainly many posts to come. But first...it's summertime. I'll see you back here around Labor Day.

In the meantime, one of the things I'm looking forward to spending some time on over the next couple months is my new travel agency, Any Which Way Travel. The website will always be a work in progress but is fully up and running if you'd like to check it out and pass it along to anyone you know who might like help in planning and/or implementing their own great adventures: http://www.anywhichwaytravel.com.

Have a great summer and see you in September!

Trip end and trip map

Okay. It's time. The last post of the trip. The journey ends where it began 3.5 months ago: in Sydney. (And actually, we even spent our last morning on Australian soil having breakfast with the same family friends at the same restaurant where we had breakfast the March morning we arrived with my mom. Could not ask to come full circle more literally!) 

 

Only now, it's the dead of winter here. Since that means lovely weather not nearly cold enough for snow, it's no hardship. But I did get to see snow in Australia!: at this little enclosure for kids where they manufacture it. For some reason that just struck me as hysterical, and a good final photo.

 

 

At the end of last year's mega North American road trip, I posted a map of my trip route, and a few of you seemed to particularly enjoy that visualization. Thought I'd do the same as the parting post for the Australia/Bali trip of 2014. Pardon the athletic tape covering my mistakes and cobbling together two pieces of paper, the poor lighting in the campervan, and all the other signs that this map was made by someone traveling around with only what a backpack can hold! Okay, with that enthusiastic recommendation....

 

 

Back on down the Queensland coast

Once we spent some time in the Daintree and on the Great Barrier Reef, it was time to head back south from whence we came. Luckily there is so much to see and do on the Queensland coast that we were able to do totally different things on the way back down than we had on the way up, and we still left multiple things undone. I really liked the town of Port Douglas, with its historical church...

...beautiful bay views...

...and its own stretch of those perfect beaches that Australia is just dripping in.

As we continued south through and out of the Wet Tropics, the sugar cane continued to keep us company, and this time we even saw the "cane train" in action, since it's harvest time.

We enjoyed a quick stop in Townsville, with its AMAZING view from the top of Castle Hill...

...and a lovely rainforest walk in Eungella National Park.

SR even got one more "big things" picture--very appropriately, after all that sugar cane we've driven past, with a cane toad.

The beach at Cape Hillsborough National Park was particularly beautiful, and though it's sad to see the wing of a blue tiger butterfly that has seen better days, they move so fast we couldn't get a picture of a live one, and I just love these colors.

We spent a couple nights in Agnes Waters / 1770, and got to see the beach where Captain Cook first landed on the Queensland coast back in...1770.

We also went on a sunset kayak trip from 1770.

One of our last nights with the camper van was spent at Norval Park, right on the beach at this incredibly peaceful spot. A pretty perfect way to start closing out the trip, with beautiful sunset colors and dolphins frolicking offshore.

Not quite done yet, but can you feel the bittersweet mood of a fantastic trip about to draw to a close? I sure can....

Plates

There will still be a couple more Australia posts, but the trip is (too quickly) drawing to a close, so I thought I'd bring out the plates! Now that we've been to every Australian state/territory, I have pictures of license plates from all of them. The ACT (Australian Capitol Territory) one is kind of a cheat; I hadn't started taking pictures of plates when we drove through Canberra, and that state being as tiny as it is, you don't see many ACT plates elsewhere. So I had to nab the last photo from one on the wall of the Daly Waters Pub in the outback. Anyhow, in no particular order...

 

 

 

Great Barrier Reef!

Huge splurge: taking an overnight sailing trip out to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns! And SO worth it. We visited three different reef sections: Flynn, Miln, and Moore, and went to several sites on each. There was spectacular snorkeling at all of them, and I made the splurge even bigger by doing three scuba dives as well. I rented an underwater camera for a day but somehow missed getting pictures of some of the most incredible things, like dolphins swimming alongside the boat, sighting a sea snake (from the safety of the boat, thank goodness), jellies and a small shark...all of it was so incredible. Here are some of the pictures I did get, which don't even begin to do it justice.