From Cardwell, Qld

Hello Family and Friends,
Tonight's entry is dedicated to my brother Terry who lost his struggle with cancer today. May he rest in peace. It was Terry who partly motivated our epic adventure around Australia the long way to catch up with him. Sadly our timing was a couple of days out.
In memory of him we will share the rest of our journey.
Since our last entry in Mt Isa we travelled to Richmond, headwind all the way and the fuel economy was way down; now I know why it is suggested to travel anti clockwise. Richmond is part of the Dinosaur triangle. The discovery centre is amazing with the skeletons of marine reptiles and dinosaurs found locally as well as the moon rocks. We immediately became avid fossickers, with map and pen knifes we started digging in the 100 million year old sea bed, in one of the alloted sites. Rex struck pay dirt quickly, uncovering good fossilised sea shells which he gave to a child fossicker. Not me I coveted everything I found; what I thought was a tooth, a piece of fossilised bone and shells all went into the collection to bring home along with the copper rocks and the iron rocks; no wonder the fuel economy is down. The photo tonight has to be of the fossilised dinosaurs bones found at Richmond.
Charters Towers was just an overnight stop but again we were fortunate to have night time entertainment. This time country and western; Golden Oldies which keep the park entertained till bedtime. Next morning we travelled further east to Townsville turning north towards Cairns stopping at Cardwell which was a good choice. We travelled through sugar cane and banana terriotory - miles of it and in the background beautiful clouded mountains with lush forest where the sun doesn't reach the ground. Fishing last night at the jetty we couldn't catch a cold but we were fortunate to see a huge, metre round, green turtle, who I think had a good feed of prawns and burley which Rex was using to tempt the fish. Today we went out to Murray Falls National Park along a winding road through sugar cane fields and banana plantations into the misty mountains. A great place to camp in the rainforest with magnificent falls and rock spa pools to cool off in as today the sun shone.
Catch up again soon
Rob and Rex