Day 17, Year 3: Day Trip to Townsville
Date: Monday, May 26, 2008
Weather: Another Lovely, Partly Cloudy Day
Location: Horseshoe Bay, Magnetic Island, Queensland, Australia
What a wonderful day! We really enjoyed our trip to Townsville on the mainland. We were up early and on the bus to Nelly Bay by 7:20 am. Our bus driver asked us if we were taking the ferry to Townsville and we said we were. He then said, “Oh, you’re going to Australia. Then you’ll have to be ‘De-Magnetized.'” Obviously Magnetic Islanders think of themselves independently of the mainland.
Townsville is Queensland’s largest city in the tropics, but it definitely has a small town feel to it. Mark and I remembered it as a nice little town, and we were so pleasantly surprised to find that it is really much, much nicer than we remembered. It is the first place we have been that made us both think that we could actually live here. The people are so very, very friendly and helpful, the weather is great, and the town is really special. The old-style Australian buildings in the downtown
area have been kept in beautiful condition and The Strand is just fantastic. This is a park along the water’s edge that runs the entire length of the city waterfront. We are amazed that the town governments here have huge gas grills in every park so people can enjoy cook-outs in the park, and everything is so clean. We did read a sign today that said vandalism/graffiti would result in a seven year prison sentence. So maybe this is how they keep everything so nice. Whatever . . . we walked almost
the entire length of The Strand and we found the neighborhood where our daughter Heather lived while attending university here. Her street was one block from the ocean and the apartment building she lived in hasn’t changed one bit in the last twelve years. Our next goal was to take the bus out to James Cook University (JCU) to go to the bookstore and try to get some JCU bumper stickers for Heather. This was a little request of hers that we were only too glad to try and fulfill. The university
is way out of town and it was a forty minute bus ride from downtown, but we were so glad we went out there and revisited the campus. On the way back into town, we stopped at a huge shopping area called Stockland and picked up a computer video cable. We hope to put a flat screen monitor that our son Justin gave us in our cockpit and connect it with the cable we bought today to our computer down in the main cabin. That way we can take full advantage of our navigation software without having to put
our computer in the cockpit. We’ll let you know if this all works out.
It was almost two in the afternoon by the time we got back from our university/shopping trip, so we had to head immediately back to the ferry. The day went so quickly and we could have spent much more time just enjoying Townsville-but it is time to move on. So we headed back to Magnetic Island and Windbird and started getting ready for an early morning departure. Tomorrow’s sail is about forty miles to Orpheus Island.
I regress just a bit to our Skype call with our grandson Sam late last night. We had a great wireless connection on the boat that allowed us both to use video. So instead of talking with him in his late evening, we were able to call in our late evening and watch him getting wound up for another day of activity. He watched us and jabbered away excitedly. He now throws kisses to us and actually tries to kiss the computer screen. He is just too cute. By next weekend we will be in Cairns which
is the last outpost of civilization in northern Queensland. We’ll probably be able to make one more Skype call from there and then no more until we reach Darwin. We will definitely have Sam withdrawal symptoms from Cairns to Darwin, so that will give us the incentive to move north quickly.
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| 080526 Day 17 Day Trip to Townsville |
