We set off from the Big4 Adventure Whitsunday at 9am. I think we were all glad to be leaving. We’d enjoyed our stay but we were ready to be without all the people. Airlie Beach is lovely but it is a tourist town and busy with lots of visitors. The Big4 is a huge park but it was almost full for the 5 nights we were there. We were all looking forward to having a bit of space around us.

Stopped at Bowen to check out the Visitor’s Centre and The Big Mango, another big thing to add to the growing list we’ve seen.

We saw lots of vegetable growing around Bowen. It was near there we saw our first pineapple plantations and mango orchards.

After Bowen the road passes though very flat cattle country. The A1 was very busy with trucks, RV’s of all types, buses and cars.

Away off to the left as we travelled north we could see the line of hills that form part of the Great Dividing Range

Spied another big thing at Gumlu so we stopped for a pic with The Big Pumpkin. There was a large fruit and vegetable stall selling all sorts of fabulous produce. The area is a huge vegetable growing one. Vast fields of vegetables were on both sides of the highway

We came into The Burdekin Shire. The Burdekin Shire grows the most amount of sugar cane in Australia. Huge fields of sugar cane with the little cane trains again. We crossed the very wide Burdekin River after Home Hill.

We pulled up at Plantation Park as we came into the town of Ayr for a lunch break. This is a huge park with plenty of room for parking. We found a good spot under some trees near the huge Adventure Playground. A temporary Visitors Centre is located in the park and further on was another big thing, a giant carpet python.

We had to check that out. Turns out that it is a sacred place for the local Indigenous people. Gubulla Munda is the totem for the local people and it is in this spot that some of the ancestors bones were reinterred after being returned to Australia from the UK. There is scientific evidence that the Birri-Gubba nation have been in the area for over 40,000 years.

From Ayr we started to head inland. We avoided going all the way to Townsville and turned off onto the Woodstock-Giru Road.

We left behind the cane fields and found our camp for the night at a farm stay in Majors Creek. The farm stay is on a Mango orchard. There is a mailbox at the front gate that contains registration forms and maps of the farm. You are free to park anywhere under the huge 100 year old mango trees in the front paddock. They have two powered sites, potable water is available, rubbish bins and you can have a fire. They provide a few fire pits and you can collect wood in the paddock.

After setting up camp the kids walked down to the back of the farm and had a play at the creek. You could see from the debris in the trees on the creek bank how high the water level in the little creek can get up to.

We utilised one of the fire pits, an old washing machine inner, and had a great night around the fire. Late in the afternoon another motorhome came in but they camped away from us and we felt like we had the place to ourselves. That was lovely after being in the Big4 for the last 5 days. On to Charters Towers in the morning.