Rick and Rae's Travels: Fri, 2nd to Sat, 3rd September

On Friday we once again we said goodbye to Kay and Glen as they were heading in a different direction to us. We had a big day ahead of us ... a 15km drive up the road to a town called Mareeba! Mareeba is located approximately 65kms inland from Cairns. We went into the Mareeba Rodeo Grounds, where we could camp for $15 per night with power, water, amenities and access to washing machines. We booked in for two nights, set up camp and once again caught up with washing all the linen. We have a small washing machine in the van but it only holds the equivalent of one sheet at a time, so sometimes we need to use a campground washing machine. There were roos everywhere in the grounds and I counted about 15 that I could see from our van.

With the chores done, we went for a drive into town and had a look at the Mareeba Visitors' Centre and historic museum. This was another excellent display and we spent a good hour having a look around and found out about a few things to have a look at. Rick was pleased to hear there was a speedway meeting scheduled for the following day and that the speedway was right next door to where we were staying. We had a bit more of a drive around to get our bearings, before heading back to camp. We discovered that each Friday night the local scout group uses one of the rodeo canteen facilities to cook and sell hamburgers. We decided to support the scouts and save on washing up by having hamburgers for dinner.

On Saturday Rick washed the van again and I gave the inside a bit of a 'do'. By the time we had finished it was nearly lunchtime. We drove into town and went to the Beck Museum, which is the largest privately owned aviation and military museum in Queensland. Once again it was an impressive collection although being stored in an open-ended shed, most of the items were covered in dust and would eventually deteriorate.

We left there to go to 'Coffee Works' for lunch. We didn't bother doing the whole tour as it was all a bit too commercial with lots of 'touristy' unrelated items for sale. The small samples of chocolate on offer were very nice, but it was extremely expensive to buy, costing around $7 per 100grams. Lunch was very nice and my coffee was delicious! We then drove a little further out of town to the Golden Drop Mango Winery which was a little disappointing. Rick had a couple of tastes before purchasing a sweet dessert wine. The mango trees in the orchard were nice looking trees and we could see they were just starting to develop fruits. We passed several sugar cane fields on the way in various stages of growth.

We returned to the van and I did a couple of small loads of washing in our machine, while we played a game of TriOminos. Thanks Jen for the game ... we have played it quite often when we haven't had TV reception. A bit later in the afternoon Rick went around the corner to the speedway while I caught up on the blog.