Day 24: Bruce is broken

Odo: 17342, Day's KM: 460.7, Trip KM: 6360

Yeppoon to Maryborough via many roadworks

Only one photo today - the welcoming committee in our tent site at the caravan park.  A quite friendly mother hen and four chicks, all largely unconcerned with people walking around.

We headed back to Tim's parents house today, and found it an altogether frustrating day.

To start with, I felt a bit ordinary during the day with plenty of sneezing fits (which I can report this evening is basically gone again - perhaps the tent was a bit damp when I put it away a few days ago and that was triggering allergies).  Not the greatest thing on a bike, but could have been worse.  Telfast appeared to fix it which was good.  Energy levels weren't so great.

We left camp around 8AM, and took nearly an hour getting breakfast at a cafe in town.  In this time, we had plenty of time to over-exaggerate what they must have been doing ("they must be baking the bread" "no, they must be ploughing the fields that will eventually feed the pigs that will eventually end up on your plate").  It got sillier and sillier as time went on.

We wanted to try another dirt road that went inland again to try to get off the highway, and unfortunately, the road was closed to 4WD access only, and we didn't really feel like we were in exactly the best condition to tackle it, and so we headed back to the highway.

The Bruce Highway must have taken an almighty hammering in the floods a couple of years ago, because it was STILL roadworks central.  It became an incredibly tedious day, spending around 10 hours from camp to Maryborough, and probably averaging 60km/h while we were actually on the road.  There were so many massive sections of 60km/h roadworks with no-one there, or delays caused by single-lane operation.  Our patience was stretched to its limit today.

We arrived at Tim's parents place around 6ish, after a brief stop at the bottle shop.  We were spoiled with an absolutely delicious hot meal, and were able to relax with this day finally behind us (well at least that's how I felt).

We only have a short day tomorrow, and we're reaching a point where we can resume finding some much more interesting roads.  First up on the agenda for both of us tomorrow morning is to do an oil change on our bikes, and then pack up and continue on our way.  I hope to see far fewer roadworks from now on.  Fingers crossed!