Paluma Range National Park - Jourama Falls Campground

12 – 15 July 2024

We’ve camped at Jourama Falls a couple of times before and it is a bit of a favourite. There is a large campground with unmarked spots so, after booking online, we were able to select a spot that provided some shade. Of course, Mick spent most of the time wandering around the campground and down to the creek, looking for birds to photograph. Because of his recent foot surgery, the hike to the falls was not on the agenda for us. We enjoyed spending time in and around the campground, chatting to other campers and soaking in the sounds of nature.

The campground is beside Waterview Creek

Even though we love time in National Parks, we do need to go to caravan parks for proper showers and to do washing so we decided to move on the Lucinda, still within the Ingham district.

 

Crystal Creek

 10 - 12  July 2024

Having sold the house, we needed to make our way north to find a builder, but we wanted to enjoy  some “down time” first, after the last couple of crazy months. We decided that Crystal Creek would be a good spot for our first couple of nights on the road so we booked into the caravan park. We found a well-maintained park with lots of greenery separating sites.

We were glad to just relax and spent some time walking down to the creek and enjoying the peaceful surrounds. We also went for a drive up to Big Crystal Creek in the Paluma Range National Park and Little Crystal Creek campground, just for a look. We drove down towards the mouth of the creek too, just because we’d never done that before.

Big Crystal Creek Bridge is a very popular swimming spot

Suitably refreshed we moved on after two nights, but not before a stop just a few minutes up the road for an ice cream at Frosty Mango.

Happily Homeless v2

I am writing this retrospectively as I hadn’t planned on documenting this adventure this way, but changed my mind. So… we had spent months living in Townsville again while we renovated a house with a view to selling it in a couple of years, but our plans changed when we became aware that we might be able to achieve a good price if we sold sooner rather than later. We made the final decision when we found a block of land at Atherton in a location that suited us both. We committed to buy the land so also needed to sell the house. The sale was much quicker than we had anticipated so the last few weeks were a whirl of selling unwanted items, arranging storage for the things we would keep and packing up – for the second time in 3 years.

We had downsized again but still had lots to put in storage

Finally the settlement day arrived and we set off on another grand adventure – this time until we could have our new home built. We knew there would be some challenges, but had no idea what lay ahead.