Thank You Carol!
After the Steve Irwin Zoo we headed to our next house near Noosa, just north of Brisbane, owned by Kathy and Steve. AirBnB has lots of different types of houses, this one included breakfast for everyone. Kathy and Steve raised 3 children and they are all out of the house, so they rent out those 3 rooms to people on a regular basis. Kathy told me they have as many guests as they want, which is a few nights a week. Ilise thought it was really odd to stay at someone’s house while they were still there. The oddest part for Ilise was eating dinner in their kitchen while they were watching TV in the room right next to us. I didn’t think it was a big deal at all, and I actually enjoyed my conversations with both Kathy and Steve. The morning we stayed Steve started watching his favorite football team, Brisbane, play a game in England, which I watched with him. It was very enjoyable.
We left early the next morning to get the 12:30 ferry, which was a 2 hour and 20 minute drive according to the GPS. We didn’t get too far on the highway and the traffic was totally stopped. Remember, a cyclone just passed through the area and there were some ragging rivers. We spoke to the police officer and she said that the highway was closed due to flooding and wouldn’t open until the next day. I asked if there were any other options and she said no, all the roads north were cut off. Wow, looks like we were going to lose one of our days on Fraser Island!
We got off at the next exit and spoke with another police officer and they told me the same thing, no options other than to wait for the next day and go back to Noosa and stay there for the night. Well, Ilise spotted a small group looking at a map so I got out of the car and started talking with Carol and a few others. A local young lady came up and said that the road through Kin Kan was open and we could get through the back roads. I told Carol that we had a ferry out of Riverhead and we needed to get north today. Carol was from Gympie, the next town north of the flood, so she knew the roads. We headed out with a small caravan of 5 cars to find out way around the flooded area.
At this point we knew we wouldn’t make the 12:30 ferry but there was one at 3:30 that we knew we could get on as well. We started racing through the back roads around Gympie, through Kin Kan and over some bridges that looked like there were washed out over the past day or so. Carol was driving really fast in her little car, and here we were in our minivan trying to keep up. Noah started to turn a few different shades of white and said he was getting really car sick. In addition, we were down below a quarter of a tank of gas and there wasn’t a gas station in sight. We were racing through the country side, which was amazing, and hoping that we don’t run out of gas. We pull over and tell Carol that we need gas and she told us that we needed to follow her so we could get over the proper bring over a big river further north.
Carol stopped the caravan as we got gas and then we were off again. We were well past the flooded area and we finally made it to the proper highway heading to the ferry, and we had cellular reception again so we could use our own GPS to make sure we could find our way if we lost Carol. We kept behind her for about an hour and when it was her turn to turn off in a different direction we both stopped on the side of the road and traded contact info. She was so nice and generous to make sure that we made it to where we needed to go, we made it to the ferry around 1:30 and had two hours before our ferry was scheduled to leave. This gave us time to grab lunch and prepare for our ferry ride to Fraser Island. Our trip to the island is a whole other story that deserves its own blog post.
‘Til next time……
Larry Kesslin 