Monday 29th - At 5am I couldn’t take lying awake in bed any more so I got up. The sky was crystal clear, and full of stars, so I decided to go for a walk with my camera to try to catch the sunrise. The previous late afternoon we had seen some vans out on the point but couldn’t work out how to get there. This morning I decided to walk along the mangroves and low tide sand/mud/rocks to see where it went. I ended up walking all the way to the point, across outgoing streams and sandbanks. It was really nice. I finally got all the way out to the point and saw that it was the proper camp ground for the area. It was Yarrawonga Park Reserve and it was free camping. It was a beautiful place with plenty of room, but no amenities of course. I spoke to a guy out there and he had been going out there for 20 years. Next time I am in the area, I will make sure I camp out there. I walked back along the track from the point, only to find that it was the same track that we had camped on overnight, just about 2kms further out. The track was full of rain puddles from last night, but it was a lot smoother than the track we had ended up camping next to. Mind you, if we had kept driving, we wouldn’t have made it in time to set up camp before the storm hit. I took some really nice photos.

When I got back – I had been away for 1 ½ hrs – the others had already had breakfast so we packed up and left the area. The neighbouring farmer stopped by and told us that it was a good thing we didn’t camp at the spot that was in the book, as there was a resident 14’ croc there that had already attacked two boats! He said they had never had so many croc sightings as they have had this year! I never saw one, nor any signs of any. On the sand, in a sand nest amongst the debris, I did find a black speckled, white bird’s egg, which was the same size as a chook’s egg. I asked Klaus later, and even took him to see it, and he thought it was a Tern’s egg, but he said they normally lay two eggs. Maybe something got the other one, although there was no sign of broken shell, or of mum and/or dad.

Back out to the main road again, we turned south. The road was really boring, with no features to talk of. This was the most mind numbing stretch of road that I have driven on, for a long time. (k) Just before Rockhampton, we turned towards Yeppoon, and when we had gone the 33kms to Yeppoon, we turned south along the coastline and ended up at Big4 Capricorn Palms, Mulambin Beach.

We setup camp as quickly as possible to try to dry out the camper from last night’s storm. Marg will stay with us again tonight as we are taking her to the Rockhampton airport early tomorrow, and she will fly home. By sleeping with us, her tent won’t be wet for the rest of the trip home. We will repack everything so that we only need to get out our stuff. We ended up travelling 298kms today, not as much as the 474 kms yesterday from Townsville.

Apparently we are going out for dinner tonight, so I have to go and have a shower!Here are some photos from this morning.

 West hill drying out from last night's big storm - the 1st rain since leaving Sydney 5 weeks ago.

 Sunrise over the outgoing tidal flats

 The view from the top of the easter point. Our camp is in the trees far to the right about 2kms in.

 Klaus doing some off-roading in the van.

 One of the locals called in to see us.

This frog is obviously a computer nerd. He was looking at my photos on the laptop.