Mission Beach

Today we took an alternative route rather than using the Bruce Highway with the sole purpose of spending some time at a place called Paronella Park.

Paronella Park castle

To cut a long story short, the venue was built by an Italian in order to bring his wife over from Italy. Far from me telling the whole story, simply Google Paronella Park and the whole story will be revealed.

A collection of eels, fish and turtles at feed time

We saw Bats, eels, fish and turtles in the lake

The park waterfall

Finally we took a guided tour of the premises using many of the walks










On arriving at the park we did all the things necessary to set up the caravan before taking a walk along the beach (just across the road). First sight that came into our vision was Dunk Island.

Sunday

Well the weather has changed! We had a fairly heavy downpour during the night and there has been a slight drizzle for most of today.

Dunk Island

We did get a short walk along the beach and sighted Dunk Island and the Families Islands. Dunk Island is about 4 kilometres from our caravan park.

Mission beach main street

Later we walked along the main street in Mission Beach looking at the various shops and eateries and popped into the information hut for a few brochures.







We decided to catch up on our washing and hoped the clothes would dry during the day.

Monday

We had a short sharp downpour during the night and it was overcast during the beginning of the day. By 11am the skies were blue, the sun was out and it was back to the mid 20's.

We decided to drive to a local beach (Kurrimine) as it was advertised that we could, at extra low tide,walk out and see the coral. Unfortunately we never found the location so we just enjoyed the drive around the area, surrounded by sugar cane fields.

Next we drove to El Arish in an attempt to find a butcher that was advertising prime Angus beef (for our Bar-B-Q tonight. Once again we failed to find our intended target!

As a last resort, we found Woolworths and bought the meat there.

Our thoughts about Mission Beach is it is a nice place to drop into and veg out walking the beach, other than than, not a lot going on.

Tuesday

Our last day at Mission Beach. We spent the days reading in the sunshine. Then a walk along the beach for the last time, taking in our last view of the Coral Sea and the off-shore Islands including Dunk Island.

During the later part of the afternoon we got the maps out to plan for the journey to Airlie Beach. It looks like a fairly early start as the journey will be a little over 500 kilometres however we are scheduled to stay there for 4 nights. This will hopefully give us the opportunity to set foot on at least one of the Whitsunday Islands.