Whilst Gareth had a rest, Matt & I moved all of our belongings into our new van. We had bought Keo a little present, in the hopes it would mean she wouldn't cause us any trouble. It is a little Father Christmas toy which now hangs from the rear view mirror!

With Gareth feeling a little refreshed, we set off in convoy to the airport to drop off our hire car and then made our way back onto the Bruce Highway and out of Rockhampton! Finally we felt back to normality again .

We drove down the coast until we reached 1770 & Agnes Water, 2 very small beach towns next to each other. We had hoped to spend a whole day in this area & maybe have a go at surfing but with the crash it wasn't to be so we had to settle for just having lunch there! Still it is a very pretty part of the coast and a good spot to relax for a while. In case you're wondering, 1770 is the actual name of this place and it is named after the year Captain Cook first landed in Queensland.

After lunch we were back on the road and headed for a town called Bundaberg. We had heard you could go on night time tours there to see turtles come up the beach to lay their eggs and it just happened to be the right season for it! Imagine our disappointment though when we finally managed to get a phone number for the tour company only to discover their office had already closed! It directed us to their website as you could book places online but it turned out the tour was fully booked anyway! There didn't seem any point in staying in Bundaberg overnight if we couldn't do the tour, especially as it was still early, so we decided to continue our journey to a town called Maryborough, where we encountered the grumpiest caravan park owner so far who insisted on us having 2 sites rather than 1 making our stay there twice as expensive! We decided to seek some recompense by using as much electricity as possible by charging all of our electrical items at every available power point and making plenty of noise whilst cooking dinner!

The following morning we woke up to discover we had actually spent the night in what looked like the village of the damned! It was awful! Pretty much all of the people staying there were on long term sites and were well into their 70s so moved very slowly around the camp! While the people that were younger looked like they should be shut in a caravan site and never allowed out so we certainly stood out in our brightly coloured van & with our ability to walk at speed!

We had picked up a leaflet from the office about a bus tour that took place in the main town so we called the Visitor Information Centre to see if we could book onto it, only to be informed that the tour had stopped running 3 months earlier! There was a walking tour which was about to leave but we couldn't get there in time so we decided to pop into the Visitor Information Centre, pick up some leaflets & maps and do our own tour! As it turned out, despite being 30 minutes later than the guided tour in leaving the centre we actually managed to catch them up and, as there were only 2 ladies on the tour, joined them!

The tour was led by a very knowledgable local resident named Ian who was dressed in a fancy pinstripe suit! He took us around the whole town, pointing out the various points of interest and explaining the history behind them. The 2 ladies on the tour were from a nearby village so were also quite knowledgable but also asked a lot of questions so we learnt an awful lot in the hour and a half we were out walking, including how the Botanic Gardens contains the trees that were actually meant to be in the Sydney Botanic Gardens but because they relocated the officer, who had collected the seeds during his travels around the world, to this tiny little town that no one had ever heard of, he decided to plant the seeds there in protest and now Maryborough hosts one of the most international botanic gardens in the whole of Australia with at least one tree from every continent!

My favourite part of the tour came at the end as Ian brought us to the Mary Poppins statue. The reason for the statue is it marks the entrance to the building the author of Mary Poppins (P. L. Travers) was born in. In fact she spent the first few years of her life living in Maryborough and there are many references to the town in the stories. For example, her Dad was the bank manager (just like the father in the story, Mr Banks), a canon used to be fired every day to signal 1pm, her house is just up the road from a huge park (just like the one in the painting they all jumped into) and of course the name Mary! I also enjoyed embarrassing Gareth by telling the story of how, as children, Gareth & I learnt all the words to the song Jane & Michael Banks (the children) sing about their perfect nanny and performed it at every opportunity! I then got the song stuck in my head so continued to sing it throughout the day much to the boys' frustration!

Maryborough was a really beautiful, quaint little town that we were all glad to have stopped at as its certainly not on the usual backpackers trail! I just can't wait to watch Mary Poppins again now and look for more links to the town!