Mission Beach Holiday, Part 1

Our holiday started very smoothly; We were all up early well before 6am, so we were just ready in time for our 7:15am taxi to the airport. We left plenty of extra time to make our 9:25am flight because of World Youth Day (week?).

The flight was no problem although there were only adult shows on the Qantas in-flight entertainment, which is pretty crap. I’d brought 2 laptops with me, one had an absolutely flat battery and wouldn’t even start, while the 2^nd had been recently setup with Linux and didn’t have the required video codecs. This meant that despite having a range of DVD’s with us we couldn’t play any. Stephen was happy in any case listening to Mike’s iPod.

The Hertz car rental was smooth, however the baggage carousel was clearly being manned by a single one armed man as it took a long time for any luggage to appear. Taemar was strongly suggesting to Mike that a luggage trolley would have been a great idea as we got to about 200m of the 500m walk to our hire car (although Mike was carrying all the bags except for one!)

The drive to Mission Beach was easy and for once the GPS was absolutely spot on with the location and directions.

Our house by the sea is lovely and could probably be described as rustic. I love the corrugated iron roof & we’ve had plenty of rain to listen to on the roof! The best part is from our deck it’s 20m of grass, then the sand of the beach – lovely. If we’re not listening to the rain on the roof we can listen to the surf a stones throw away.

On our first night wen went to one of the local restaurants for pizza – yum!

On Sunday there was a local market – not interesting as with every market, however time passed. We went for a walk on the beach, heading North, relaxed, had coffee, and lunch in town. Mike really enjoyed the works burger.

On Monday we fell into our routine of breakfast at home followed by the trip into town (about 50 metres) for coffee, the paper and lunch. We went for a long walk on the beach to the south. Mike & Stephen went quite some way as they were kicking a ball and running. On the way back Stephen & Mike were distracted by sand and dug some large holes and joined them together. Mike & Stephen also enjoyed playing soccer on the front deck. In the afternoon we went for a short bushwalk. What was interesting about this were the signs saying “don’t feed the Cassowary’s”. Mike carried a stick just in case because there were warning signs saying that Cassowary’s can get aggressive if fed. It was only when we went to the Crocodile farm on Wednesday that we realized how dangerous Cassowary’s actually are.

On Tuesday we went for a walk on the beach again although this time we headed North. Stephen & Mike dug a quite impressive moat with a feature tunnel. In the middle were towers and we then built a bridge across to the other side.

On Wednesday it was very rainy. We spent the morning lazing around the house and then we went to the crocodile farm. We made it in perfect time for the crocodile feeding which was great. The crocodiles were quite sleepy as it was a bit cool for them, but we got to see quite a few of these impressive creatures. We also got to feed some Kangaroos and hold a small crocodile, however we turned down the opportunity to hold a rather large snake… There were also two Cassowary’s as well and we learnt that they are the most dangerous bird in the world. They have a middle tow that is called a garroting claw and they know how to use it! Also, if they have been fed by humans they will expect humans to keep feeding them, but if they come across a human who doesn’t feed them they attempt to persuade them by kicking them with their garroting claw…not fun!

We had lunch at a café in Innisfail and then on the return trip home our windscreen wipers stopped working. As it was pouring we couldn’t continue and we had to call the RACQ. After a little over an hour of keeping a bored 5 year old entertained the RACQ guy turned up…and the wipers worked perfectly…awesome!

For dinner Taemar cooked a beautiful chicken laksa with the fresh coconut juice we got from the coconuts out the front of our place. Stephen was a little worried going to sleep – he was worried that a salt water crocodile was going to come in and eat him!