Judy & Brian Tour Oz

  Port Douglas, Qld July 26, 2024 Easy 130km down the mountain to Glengarry, which is as close to Port Douglas as you’d like for a caravan park. This year, as the Cook Highway is a bit of a mess between here and Cairns, we though we might slide down there tonight, stay in a hotel and I can do my Parkrun at 7am Saturday, rather than leaving at 6 am and hoping to make it on time. We stayed in a grandly name hotel, The Palm Royale, out at a suburb called Manunda. The hotel is conveniently situated not far from several shopping centres and a 10 minute drive to Paloma, which is where I’ll do the parkrun. Found the hotel easily enough, the traffic on a Friday arvo is manic, the shops all look half empty and to be honest, the whole area looked a bit seedy. Our room had a nice little balcony overlooking the pool and we decided to drink bubbles and get a pizza for dinner. All the pizza shops, and there are  a lot, just around our area, all seemed to be flat-out. I finally drove to o...

Port Douglas Qld 11 August 2019 Well, our week here in (or almost in) Port Douglas is coming to an end. After the first few days of coolness and drizzle, the weather has cleared up and it's pushing 30c most days. What have we done? The big items were the tour of Mossman Gorge with the native guide, which was interesting and enjoyable. Drove down to Cairns and went to the markets up at Karunda, which is a pleasant enough drive, but the 'markets' are just more of the same tourist-trash as everywhere, and basically it just provides somewhere to go. We did have a rather nice lunch at the pub though, one of the place's redeeming qualities. We also had booked on a music tour up the river on the Lady Douglas. supposed to go from 6.30pm to 7.30pm, but wait, what a surprise, they called and cancelled it citing us as being the only guests. But of course wouldn't we love to go on the 4.30pm sunset tour. What a giant pain, and a mistake to be sure. The boat was packed and noi...